E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
Gildea Fighters in the Shadows
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ISBN: 978-0-571-28035-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A New History of the French Resistance
E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28035-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and European History, with a particular focus on the Second World War. His previous work on France under the German Occupation, Marianne in Chains (2002) won the Wolfson History Prize. The Past in French History (1994) explored French collective memory and political culture since the Revolution. Most recently he directed an international oral history project, published as Europe's 1968: Voices of Revolt (2013). He is married with four children and lives in Oxford.
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On 16 May 2007, the day of his inauguration as French president, Nicolas Sarkozy made a pilgrimage to the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris to pay homage to thirty-five resisters executed by the Germans during the final momentous days of the liberation of Paris in August 1944. ‘The resisters were young. They died. But what they embodied was invincible. They said “no”. “No” to subjection, “no” to dishonour, “no” to what belittles human beings, and this “no” continues to be heard after their deaths because it is the eternal cry of human freedom against enslavement. It is the cry that we still hear today.’1
In his speech, Sarkozy proclaimed that those who died for France were not simply patriots who gave their lives to liberate their country. They were martyrs of humanity who died for the universal and eternal values of freedom and dignity. He was keen, moreover, that this message should be transmitted to all young French people, who were invited in numbers to the commemoration. One high-school student read the last letter to his parents of Guy Môquet, a seventeen-year-old resister executed by the Germans in 1941. Sarkozy pledged that this letter would be read out every year in all French schools. Guy Môquet had been a communist. His father was a communist deputy who had been imprisoned and the twenty-six men with whom Guy was shot were also communists. But the Cold War had been won, the French Communist Party was a shadow of its old self, and the moral that could be drawn from the young man’s death was again a universal one that ‘the greatness of man is to dedicate himself to a cause that is greater than himself’.
The story of the French Resistance is central to French identity. The country was defeated in 1940, overwhelmed by a German Blitzkrieg that lasted a mere six weeks. The northern half of France was occupied immediately, the southern half in November 1942, in response to the Allied landings in North Africa. Power was assumed by Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, who promptly abolished the French Republic and set up an authoritarian regime with its capital in the spa town of Vichy in central France. The French divided between those who collaborated with the Germans, those who resisted them, and those in the middle who resigned themselves to the situation and ‘muddled through’. The Vichy regime succumbed to pressure from the Germans to deport 75,000 Jews living in France – 24,000 of them French and 51,000 of them of foreign origin – to the death camps. The French waited four years for the Allies to return to French soil to help them drive out the Germans. Paris was liberated in August 1944 and the Germans were finally pushed out of the country. French troops drove into Germany and set about recovering lost colonial territories in the Near East and Indochina and with that some of their former national greatness.
To deal with the trauma of defeat, occupation and virtual civil war, the French developed a central myth of the French Resistance. This was not a fiction about something that never happened, but rather a story that served the purposes of France as it emerged from the war. It was a founding myth that allowed the French to reinvent themselves and hold their heads high in the post-war period. There were several elements to this narrative. First, that there was a continuous thread of resistance, beginning on 18 June 1940, when an isolated de Gaulle in London issued his order to resist via the BBC airwaves, and reaching its climax on 26 August 1944, when he marched down the Champs-Élysées, acclaimed by the French people. Second, that while a ‘handful of wretches’ had collaborated with the enemy, a minority of active resisters had been supported in their endeavours by the vast majority of the French people. A third element was that, although the French were indebted to the Allies and some foreign resisters for their military assistance, the French had liberated themselves and restored national honour, confidence and unity.
This myth was orchestrated very effectively right from the very moment of liberation. After Charles de Gaulle was welcomed at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris on 25 August 1944, he addressed the crowd in the streets outside. His words, frequently quoted, may be seen as a first bid to define a myth of resistance and liberation, even before the liberation of France was complete:
Paris liberated! Liberated by its own efforts, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help of all of France, that is France in combat. The one France, the true France, eternal France.2
The narrative was elaborated in a series of ceremonies after France finished the war and took the surrender of the Germans in Berlin as one of the Allied powers. At a parade held in Paris on 18 June 1945, the fifth anniversary of de Gaulle’s appeal, the Free French forces who had continued the armed fight eclipsed the forces of the internal French Resistance both in number and style. Tanks rolled past, representing the arm in which de Gaulle had himself fought, and a flypast drew his symbol, a Cross of Lorraine, in the sky.3 De Gaulle’s resistance myth was military, national and male. It was sanctified by a new chivalric order, the Compagnons de la Libération, founded in November 1940. Numbering only 1,038, they were handpicked for their deeds of valour during the epic of liberation; 81 per cent were serving officers, only 5 per cent were foreigners and a mere 0.6 per cent were women.4 The national dimension of the Resistance narrative was imposed by marginalising any idea that it might be seen as an international struggle against fascism and Nazism that was fought in part on French soil by resisters who might be Spanish republicans or Polish Jews. On 11 November 1944, in the company of Winston Churchill, de Gaulle laid a wreath at the statue of First World War premier Clemenceau at the bottom of the Champs-Élysées, and announced the Resistance as only an episode in a Thirty Years War fought with Germany between 1914 and 1944.
Such a myth, powerful though it was, never exercised complete hegemony over the minds of French people. Communists, who played a leading role in resistance combats and emerged as the largest political party after the war, were happy to subscribe to the dominant narrative so long as they enjoyed power, but when the Cold War came in 1947 and they were ejected from the government, they insisted on their own separate story.5 The Communist Party (PCF) defined itself as the party of the 75,000 fusillés, their estimate of the number of communist victims shot by the Germans. This was undoubtedly an overestimate but the Communist Party highlighted one dramatic case of martyrdom: the twenty-seven communist hostages – including Guy Môquet – who were shot at Châteaubriant in October 1941 in reprisal for the assassination of the Feldkommandant of Nantes by a communist hit squad. A monument of five muscular men tied to a stake and plainly singing the ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Internationale’ was unveiled in October 1950 in the clearing where they had died. Rivalry for the ownership of this memory was symbolised by the fact that the city of Nantes raised its own monument (in October 1952) to the sixteen non-communist hostages shot in Nantes, as well as to the communists executed at Châteaubriant. The mayor of Nantes praised the role of the Vichy authorities who had intervened with the Germans to prevent a second round of executions threatened by the Germans and the good people of Nantes who had endured the reprisals with dignity. This ceremony was pointedly boycotted by the communists, who held their own separate vigil and demonstrated how sharply divided memories of resistance could be.6
What might be called the Gaullist myth of resistance suffered the setback of being divided against itself during the Algerian War of 1954–62. North Africa had been the military and political platform from which France had been liberated but the war fought to retain Algeria ten years later used brutal methods, including the torture of insurgents. The camp of former resisters split between those who equated liberation with the restoration of national greatness and those who were troubled by the ‘Nazi’ methods used by the French military against Algerian rebels. In order to restore unity to the Resistance camp, the cult of Jean Moulin – who had briefly united the competing factions of the French Resistance under the direction of de Gaulle in London and who had died a martyr – was duly promoted. In December 1964, in advance of the first presidential elections under universal suffrage since 1848, in which de Gaulle hoped to triumph, the remains of Jean Moulin were solemnly transferred to the France’s hall of heroes, the Panthéon. This was the apogee of the unifying Gaullist myth and de Gaulle was duly re-elected to the presidency the following year. However, the legacy of the Algerian War divided Algerian immigrants and French settlers repatriated after Algerian independence in 1962 and nurtured the extreme-right-wing populism of the Front National in post-colonial France.
De Gaulle’s fall from power in 1969 and his death soon after weakened the carapace of the central myth of French Resistance and allowed other stories to come to the surface. The commonplace assertion that only a few French people had disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Germans while the overwhelming majority of French people had supported the Resistance was called into question by Marcel Ophüls’...
