No less revealing of the neglect of the Resistance by professional French historians was the fact that the major contribution to the history of the Resistance in the 1980s came from Daniel Cordier, a former resister outside the historical establishment. During the war, Cordier had run Jean Moulin’s secretariat, and he possessed an archive of telegrams and correspondence between the Resistance and the Free French. As Cordier tells his story, at the Liberation he had put the past behind him, and started a thirty-year career as a dealer in modern art, avoiding contact with Resistance circles. In 1977, however, he was invited to appear in a television debate on Moulin, and found himself sharing a platform with Henri Frenay who put the case that Moulin had been a crypto-Communist. To disprove this allegation, Cordier returned to his archives. What started as a desire to refute Frenay blossomed into the ambition to write a full biography of Moulin.88
Despite being an actor from the period he was studying, Cordier writes as a historian, confronting the fallibility of memory and the unreliability of anecdotes with the authority of archival evidence. His biography of Moulin runs to over 4,000 pages.89 Cordier has provided the most fully documented and finely analysed account of the high politics of the Resistance, especially the relationship between London and the Resistance. But Cordier’s work originated as an act of piety—almost an act of love—and despite his aspiration towards scientific rigour, he sometimes falls into the role of defence counsel for Moulin. His approach to the Resistance is insufficiently open-ended, transforming Moulin almost into a historical necessity.
Cordier’s enterprise is a very personal one, but since the late 1980s there has been a revival of interest in the Resistance among historians. There are three reasons for this. First, the gradual de-Stalinization of the French Communist Party paved the way for an opening up of the Party’s historiography. In 1968 a French Communist historian admitted for the first time the existence of a secret protocol attached to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Such early revisionism was faltering, and when the Party historian Roger Bourderon started a timid critique of Communist historiography in 1979, he was called to order. A turning point came in 1983 with a conference on ‘the Communist Party between 1939 and 1941’ attended by both non-Communist and Communist historians. Their interpretations remained different, but the occasion was at least a dialogue, suggesting it might soon be possible to move beyond the single, and sterile, question whether or not the Communists had started to resist before June 1941.90
Secondly, the more complex account of the relationship between Vichy and public opinion which emerged in the 1980s reopened the problem of the relationship between the Resistance and the French population. Henri Michel had once written: ‘the Resistance always comprised a minority … and the majority of attentistes… could not pardon it for having been right and having saved them’.91 But the new research into public opinion, viewing attentisme in more complex terms, opened the way towards less Manichaean interpretations of the relationship between population and Resistance. Such re-evaluation was easier to undertake if one had not been personally involved in the period, and this provides a third reason for the renewed interest in Resistance in the late 1980s: the prospect that the Resistance generation was coming to the end of its life.
Because many resisters had been extremely young, Resistance historiography was, until the 1980s, dominated by writers personally marked by the experience. The doyen of Resistance historians, Henri Michel, had begun to develop an almost proprietary approach to the subject, and was not always welcoming to younger scholars who wanted to work on it. Younger historians in general felt the inhibiting presence over their shoulder of the vigilant Resistance generation.92 The prickliness of many former resisters emerged at the colloquium where Cordier first presented his research. He received a hostile reception from many historic resisters, and the wartime squabbles between London and Paris were fought out again in 1983. When one of the resisters present said that Cordier’s lecture made him feel as if resisters were being judged by administrators, he sounded exactly like Henri Frenay complaining in 1942 about the bureaucratization of the Resistance by Moulin.93 At a colloquium on the Resistance held at Toulouse in 1986 two former resisters almost came to blows over what had really happened in Toulouse in 1944. But they were united in preferring to rehearse these old feuds than to engage with the questions of a young female historian about the attitude of the resistance towards gender. Her observations were treated with outrage, and allowed the old rivals of 1944 to close ranks by repeating well-worn pieties about the noble role of women in the Resistance.94
But this is changing. Three Resistance movements have recently had important theses devoted to them.95 These studies are exemplary in their attempt to combine a social analysis with a political one; they are nuanced, archivally based, and sophisticated in their use of oral material. But the most significant fact is that the authors are part of the first genuine post-Resistance generation of Resistance historians. The history of the Resistance, unlike that of Vichy, is beginning (again). It is no longer the ‘taboo’ noted by Esprit in 1992. What new approaches are emerging in the history of the Resistance? There is, first, a greater emphasis on the diversity of resistance, and on the experience of non-dominant groups such as immigrants and women.96 Secondly, there is an attempt to conceptualize resistance history in the light of insights from other disciplines such as anthropology, and to offer a more comparative dimension.97 Thirdly, more attention is being directed towards the interaction between ‘the Resistance’ narrowly defined and the social context which was the condition of its survival, between ‘Resistance as organization’ and ‘Resistance as movement’ in the words of François Marcot. Between 1993 and 1997, major colloquia on the Resistance were organized in six different French universities.98 The presiding theme of each occasion was the study of the Resistance in its social environment. This is also a major theme of Jean-Marie Guillon’s (unpublished) monumental thesis on the Resistance in the Var, of François Marcot’s work on the Jura, and of Roderick Kedward’s most recent book which continues where his first one left off, and studies the southern Maquis from 1943.99 In short, we are moving towards a social history of the Resistance.100
The future of the history of the Resistance needs to embrace its full diversity—Gaullist and non-Gaullist, Communist and non-Communist, North and South, men and women, French and immigrants—but also to reconnect the history of the Resistance to the society around it, to the French past, and to the Vichy regime. As our opening quotations have shown, the history of France in this period cannot be understood in separate compartments like ‘the Vichy regime’, ‘the Resistance’, or ‘collaboration’: these existed in dynamic relation to each other, and the history of France in this period must be conceived as a whole. There are strands, but they make up one history.
Part I
Anticipations
Introduction to Part I
In January 1945, the lifelong anti-Republican polemicist Charles Maurras was found guilty of collaboration with Germany. ‘The revenge of Dreyfus’ was Maurras’s comment on the verdict. Maurras had a famously long memory, but there were certainly echoes of the Dreyfus Affair during the Occupation. The last head of Vichy’s anti-Semitic Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was Charles Mercier Du Paty de Clam, a descendant of the Paty de Clam who had arrested Dreyfus in 1894. In 1944, Vichy’s semi-official police, the Milice, had assassinated the 81-year-old Victor Basch whose crime, apart from being a Jew, was to have been an ardent Dreyfusard and former president of the League of the Rights of Man, founded during the Dreyfus Affair. Thus the conflicts of occupied France can be seen as a continuation of what have been called the ‘Franco-French wars’—between those who accepted the legacy of the Revolution and those who did not. As the historian René Rémond says about 1940: ‘those who had never accepted 1789 finally took their revenge’.1
Some historians push the idea of the ‘two Frances’ even further back—to the division in the seventeenth century between a maritime,
liberal, and Protestant France and a rural, authoritarian, and Catholic one.2 During the Occupation the economist Charles Rist, himself a Protestant who abhorred Vichy, compared the regime’s supporters to the Catholic League of the sixteenth century: ‘Replace the Italo-Germany of Hitler–Mussolini by the Spain of Philip II and you have France’s situation under Charles IX.’ Rist also saw parallels between the behaviour of French conservatives in 1940 and 1870.3
One approach to the problem of finding a ‘pedigree’ for Vichy is offered by the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell, author of a trilogy of books on fascism in France. Sternhell has argued that, far from being an alien graft on to French political culture, fascism’s origins as a coalescence of the anti-liberal right and anti-liberal left date back to late nineteenth-century France. He goes on to argue that in the 1930s, fascist ideology, or at least a fascist sensibility, was permeating French politics, and that the Occupation can only be understood in this light.4 Sternhell has been criticized for being too imprecise in his definition of fascism, enrolling any critic of liberal democracy under the banner of fascism. Nonetheless his work does reveal, more than previous historians had done, the existence of strong anti-liberal currents in French political culture, especially in the 1930s. The British historian Tony Judt, analysing the influence of communism on French intellectuals after 1945, has also emphasized the weaknesses of liberal ideas in France. Judt notes that several Communist intellectuals had started in the 1930s as ultra-conservatives: he explains their conversion by their consistent antipathy to liberal democracy.5
To understand the history of occupied France, then, it is necessary to start before 1940. But the heterogeneity of support upon which the Vichy regime drew, at least initially, suggests that it is misleading to draw neat boundaries between ‘two Frances’—between supporters and opponents of liberal democracy. Vichy also drew upon political and cultural values shared between liberals and non-liberals, Republicans and anti-Republicans. Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common ground also complicated the early history of the Resistance. It may well be, as Robert Paxton argues, ‘that there come cruel times when to save a nation’s deepest values one must disobey the State’, but it was not necessarily clear, in 1940, what those values were, or that Vichy was in all respects opposed to them.6
Although it was France’s defeat by Germany which caused these ‘cruel times’ and exposed the prevalence of anti-liberal currents in French political culture, it is also necessary to relate the collapse of French democracy to longer-term social developments which undermined the foundations on which French political stability had been built at the end of the nineteenth century. In trying to explain the terrible events which occurred in Germany in the twentieth century, historians have often argued that the causes were rooted in the peculiarities of Germany’s social and political development at the end of the nineteenth century. The problem with this idea of a German ‘special way’ (Sonderweg) is that it implies the existence of a ‘normal’ process of development from which Germany can be said to have deviated.7 The truth is that every country has its own Sonderweg. In the case of France, the ‘peculiarity’ lay in the gradualness of industrialization, resulting in the development of a dual economy where a highly concentrated industrial sector coexisted with a large class of peasants and small producers (the classes moyennes). Political stability was preserved by an implicit coalition of interest between bourgeois elites, on the one hand, and peasants and small producers, on the other. This ‘Republican synthesis’, as Stanley Hoffmann has dubbed it, guaranteed the defence of property and provided an education system which offered the possibility of social promotion to the children of the classes moyennes. In addition it relegated the working class to the political and social margins.8
The term ‘synthesis’ is misleading if it implies that the situation was ever static. Even when the Republican consensus was working relatively well, it contained tensions and contradictions. The economic relationship between big business and small producers was never entirely harmonious despite their common opposition to organized labour. Another fault-line was religion: the division between Catholics and anticlericals. In the 1890s it had looked briefly as if this issue would be resolved when Catholics and Republicans seemed ready to bury the hatchet in the interests of social defence during the so-called ralliement—the ‘rallying’ of the Church to the Republic. But the Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century reopened the religious divide. By creating the political parties which would dominate France for the next forty years, the Dreyfus Affair built religious conflict structurally into French politics. Religion was not an epiphenomenal issue: Catholic and lay associations had networks of patronage and social organization extending into almost every crevice of French associational life.9
At the epicentre of these contradictions was the Radical Party, the pre-eminent force in French politics since 1900. As the party committed above all to anti-clericalism, the Radicals instinctively looked to alliances with the Socialists, on their left, or anticlerical conservatives, on their right. But as the party which represented above all small producers, they were suspicious both of the Socialists and of those conservatives linked to big business. The conservatives most sympathetic to small production were not necessarily those who opposed the Church. In other words, the two fault-lines within the Republican synthesis did not necessarily overlap. As long as the working class could be successfully marginalized, these contradictions were not important enough to threaten the stability of the Republic. But even before 1914 the containment of the working class was becoming increasingly difficult as industrial conflict intensified. After the war it became impossible.
The aim of Part I of this book, then, is to situate the Occupation within this longer-term context. The intention is not to provide a full history of inter-war France, but to explore some aspects of that history in the light of 1940. Chapter 1 examines the cultural legacy of the Great War, suggesting that it provided a repository of themes, transcending left and right, which in many respects anticipated Vichy. The war is an obvious place to start because, after all, the Vichy regime was headed by the popular hero of that war. It is striking how much Vichy’s National Revolution owed to the rhetoric of the Great War: the exaltation of national unity, the celebration of the Soldier-Peasant and the nurturing Mother, the cult of the military leader, and the suspicion of politicians.
Chapter 2 surveys the long history of dissatisfaction with the Third Republic and its institutions. Some of this dissatisfaction originated within the Republican mainstream from as early as the 1890s; some came from arch-conservatives; some came from the post-war generation for whom the heroic early years of the Republic were ancient history. The point of this chapter is to show that if Vichy’s renunciation of the Republic was partly a victory of reactionary conservatism, it also represented much of what was best and brightest in French politics.
Political boundaries must not, however, be blurred entirely, and Chapter 3 examines how the Great War and the Depression of the 1930s exacerbated class tensions and threatened the social bases of the Republican consensus. To the extent that there was a civil war in France between 1940 and 1944, it had started several years earlier. Chapter 4 examines some aspects of the relationship between France and Germany in the inter-war years, and discusses French responses to the German problem. What came to be called ‘collaboration’ had a long prehistory, and this complicated responses to defeat in 1940. Chapter 5 shows how many of the themes discussed in the previous chapters culminated in the last peacetime government of the Third Republic after April 1938, and examines how that government anticipated the Vichy regime which followed it.
These five chapters are all intended to suggest anticipations of the future, but not a teleology. Thus Chapter 6 will restore the notion of
discontinuity by examining the impact of the defeat of May 1940. Without defeat there would have been no Vichy regime, but without the trends examined in the previous chapters, the Vichy regime would not have taken the form that it did.
1
The Shadow of War: Cultural Anxieties and Modern Nightmares
The first French film to hit the screens after the Fall of France was Marcel Pagnol’s La Fille du puisatier (The Well-Finder’s Daughter). The film tells the story of a peasant girl, Patricia, made pregnant by Jacques, a dashing airman from a bourgeois family in the local town. He is called away for military manoeuvres, and his parents refuse to take responsibility for his behaviour. Patricia’s father, shamed by her conduct, casts her out, and she takes refuge in her aunt’s house where she gives birth to a baby boy. Eventually, succumbing to the desire to see his grandson, her father relents. Meanwhile Jacques is reported killed in the war and his distraught parents feel remorse and wish to acknowledge their grandchild. The two families are reconciled. Then it is suddenly revealed that the airman is not dead after all. He returns and asks for Patricia’s hand in marriage. She expresses the hope that once they are married, he will leave the city to live on the land: ‘I would be happy in a farm of our own on land which we were bringing to life. I would do the dishes and the cleaning—and each day at sunset I would go to the end of the path and await the return of my man coming back from the field.’
The film celebrates the virtues of motherhood, of the countryside, and of the peasantry. These were quintessential Vichy themes. So also was the idea that misfortune can lead to reconciliation and resurrection. The film’s most famous scene occurs when the two reconciled families listen, together with the rest of the village, to Marshal Pétain’s speech of 17 June announcing the need for an armistice. For such reasons La Fille du puisatier has often been seen as the first ‘Vichy film’. This would be true except that most of the filming had taken place before the defeat, and the scene containing Pétain’s speech was added quite late. Indeed, it has been alleged that when the film was shown after the Liberation, this scene was substituted with a similar one of the family listening to General de Gaulle. There is no truth in this, but it is true that there was nothing specifically Vichyist about the film. It is in the spirit of all Pagnol’s films during the 1930s.1 Being as much the last film of the Third Republic as the first film of Vichy, La Fille du puisatier suggests that there is no simple cultural caesura between the two regimes: Pagnol speaks as convincingly to the France of the Third Republic as to the France of Vichy.
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