B006NTJT4U EBOK

by Jackson, Julian

  Behind these abstract debates about the responsibility of writers lay more specific concerns that the CNE, from being the mouthpiece of the intellectual Resistance, was becoming an instrument of the Communist Party. There were signs that the Communists were ready to use their power to settle scores rather than advance the wider agenda of the Resistance. The most blatant example of this was an article by Aragon in the CNE’s review Lettres françaises in November 1944 criticizing Gide for his ambivalent attitude in the early days of the Occupation. Quite apart for the fact that the Communists had little to boast about where their attitude in 1940 was concerned, many people assumed that Gide was being singled out because of the critical book he had written in 1937 about his visit to the Soviet Union. The Communists had never forgiven him for this. Aragon, whose reputation as France’s ‘national poet’ gave him enormous influence at the Liberation, seemed now to want to play the role of communist Grand Inquisitor of letters.77 In November 1946 Paulhan finally resigned from the CNE, and was followed by several other writers who had long shared his doubts. Among them was the Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel who claimed that the CNE had become ‘an instrument of political sectarianism’.78 The unity of the literary Resistance was in ruins.

  The Resistance Betrayed?

  Looking back on the Occupation in 1946 François Mauriac wrote:

  Do you not sometimes think… of those sombre days with a secret nostalgia? Who would have said then that in liberated France we would be tempted to say: ‘Those were the good old days…?’ Certainly those days of horror were not good days. But they were days of friendship and confidence…We were not unhappy because we were over-brimming with hope, because we had confidence in each other, because we felt that we were brothers, as indeed we were.79

  This sense of nostalgia was common among former resisters by 1946. The Resistance had excited almost millenarian expectations; its rhetoric was rich with images of revolution and renewal. ‘From Liberation to Revolution’ was the slogan of Combat after the Liberation. But well before 1946 the mood had started to change. For some local resisters the moment of disillusion was their first meeting with de Gaulle. From the autumn of 1944, de Gaulle had embarked on a tour of the country to establish his authority in person. He visited Lyons on 14 September, Marseilles on 15 September, and Toulouse on 16 September. Everywhere he received the local Resistance leaders with calculated coldness verging on rudeness. This came naturally to de Gaulle, but it was also part of his strategy of bringing the Resistance to heel. In Toulouse, the regional Resistance leader Serge Ravanel remembered the day of de Gaulle’s visit, which should have been so glorious, as one of the saddest of his life: ‘Our interview lasted an hour. De Gaulle asked me no questions. I discovered the existence of an immense abyss between this man who had lived all of the war outside France, and the metropolitan Resistance which had had such a different experience.’80

  More and more Resistance leaders began at the end of 1944 to experience a sense of frustration and disappointment. At the beginning of 1945, Pierre Hervé published La Libération trahie (The Liberation Betrayed), a book whose title speaks for itself. Soon afterwards appeared Philip Viannay’s Nous sommes tous des rebelles (We are All Rebels) whose theme was similar. A year later Frenay published an article entitled ‘The Gravediggers of the Resistance’.

  It was convenient to blame de Gaulle for this sense that things had not turned out as expected, but in truth the problems of the Resistance after the Liberation went much deeper. Ravanel’s account of de Gaulle’s visit does not hide the fact that deliriously enthusiastic crowds had turned out to cheer the general. Ravanel’s sadness, then, was not only about the treatment meted out to him by de Gaulle, but also about the isolation which many resisters soon came to feel in liberated France—an isolation almost as great as in Pétainist France four years earlier.

  The ambivalence with which the Resistance had always viewed the mass of the population, and the population had viewed the Resistance, was provisionally masked by the euphoria of the Liberation. In this fête of unanimity, those who had resisted suspended their contempt for those who had not, and those who had not, bathed in the glory of those who had. But as early as the end of 1944 the Resistance was beginning to lose credit with the population. The prefect of Calvados reported in December 1944: ‘the Resistance which immediately after the Liberation enjoyed great prestige has lost the population’s esteem’.81 Perhaps this was not surprising in an area where the Resistance had never been strong, but the same was reported throughout France.82 It must be remembered that the Liberation had not ended the difficulties of daily life. In 1945 and 1946 rations were even smaller than they had been during the Occupation. Food, fuel, and soap were all hard to find, and there was a thriving black market. This situation was less easy to tolerate now that the Occupation was over. What was the point of liberation if the conditions of daily life were no better—even worse—than they had been previously? The joyous dancing of the Liberation seemed like a distant memory, and just to underline the point, even Vichy’s ban on dancing was restored in October 1944 on the grounds that it was unseemly to dance while so many prisoners and deportees still languished in Germany. De Gaulle remained extraordinarily popular, but popular discontent turned against his government and those representatives of the Resistance who were now in positions of authority.83

  In May 1945, municipal elections took place. These gave a massive victory for those political forces associated with the Resistance, especially the Communists, but also the Socialists and the new Christian Democrat party, the MRP. Right-wing parties were decimated. In that sense the elections represented a triumph for the political values of the Resistance. But they also marked the death knell of the specific institutions which had emerged from the Resistance: what was the point in the CDLs and CLLs now that genuine local democracy had been restored?84 The final flourish of the CDLs occurred in Paris between 10 and 14 July 1945 with the holding of the ‘Estates General of the French Renaissance’ at which delegates chosen from all the CDLs of France assembled to present, as in 1789, cahiers de doléances expressing the aspirations of the French population. The preparation of this event aroused almost no interest despite Communist attempts to whip up enthusiasm for it.85

  As for the hope that a single movement or party might emerge to embody the ‘ethical maximalism’ of the Resistance, this never materialized.86 The first post-war congress of the MLN in January 1944 was divided over whether or not to merge with the Communist FN. Six months later the MLN split over this issue. Those who joined the Communists soon found that there was no space for a specific Resistance voice within the Communist monolith. Those who refused to join the Communists formed themselves into a new party called the Democratic and Social Union of the Resistance (UDSR). Despite its grandiose name, this party, small in size, was a far cry from the expectations which resisters had harboured during the Occupation.

  The disappointment experienced by many resisters was inevitable because their vision of the new France was a moral and spiritual one as much as it was political. They were rediscovering the truth of Péguy’s famous aphorism: ‘Everything begins as mystique and ends as politique.’ When resisters tried to offer a more concrete account of the nature of their ‘betrayal’, they fastened on to the CNR Charter which gradually acquired a talismanic status. In fact even the CNR Charter was vague on details, and in many respects the measures carried out by de Gaulle’s provisional government between August 1944 and October 1945— when the first post-war national elections occurred—were faithful to its spirit. These measures included extensive nationalizations (there were more of these in 1946), the setting up of a national social security system, the creation of a new training school for top civil servants (ENA), and the institution of consultative committees (comités d’entreprise) in factories to represent the views of workers and other employees. This represented a major programme of social and economic reform, comparable to that undertaken after 1945 by the British Labour government.


  Yet many resisters believed that the government could have gone further. Some wanted greater power to be given to the comités d’enterprise; others wanted the government to undertake Socialist-style economic planning. Such issues were debated within de Gaulle’s government between René Pleven, the Finance Minister, and Pierre Mendès France, the Economics Minister. Mendès France argued for a temporary policy of financial austerity to avert inflation, and a long-term policy of economic planning. When de Gaulle finally came down in favour of Pleven, Mendès France resigned in April 1945. This has in retrospect been seen as a missed opportunity to carry out structural economic reforms—and Mendès France was certainly right about the danger of inflation—but it would be wrong to see his resignation as a betrayal of the Resistance. The conflict between Pleven and Mendès-France had involved two former members of the Free French, neither of whom had been in the internal French Resistance. And when it came to the comités d’entreprise, the ‘radical’ Mendès France had been in favour of limiting their powers rather than allowing them to become genuine experiments in worker participation.87

  When resisters expressed their disappointment that more radical changes had not occurred at the Liberation—Claude Bourdet subtitled his memoirs ‘From Resistance to Restoration’—they both underestimated the extent of the changes which had occurred, and implied misleadingly that there was a single radical Resistance project which the government had failed to carry out. Moreover, those areas in which the Liberation did represent continuity more than change were not always evident to resisters themselves, who shared the prevailing values of French society more than they realized. To what extent, for example, did 1944–5 see a liberation for French women? The question might seem surprising given that for the first time French women had acquired the right to vote. De Gaulle had implicitly promised this as early as June 1942 although it was hardly a major concern of his. Nor had it been a major preoccupation of the Resistance—it was not mentioned in the CNR Charter—but there was almost no objection to it either (except from the Radicals). Female suffrage was officially promulgated in a CFLN decree of 21 April 1944, and women voted for the first time in the municipal elections of May 1945. At the first post-war legislative elections in October, thirty-three women were elected to parliament.88

  Despite the political emancipation of women, however, the Liberation also witnessed an attempt to redraw traditional gender boundaries. As we have already noted, the self-image of the Resistance became increasingly masculine even as more women were participating in it. Sartre’s 1945 essay identifying collaboration with feminine passivity fits into this model. Similarly the head-shavings can be interpreted partly as a ritualized punishment of women for the independence which many of them had enjoyed, even flaunted, during the Occupation. In the Côtes-du-Nord, one woman who had had her head shaved and a swastika tattooed on her cheek complained to the prefect. Having investigated the case, the prefect was reassured by the mayor of her town that no injustice had been committed although there was no evidence she had collaborated:

  To the best of my knowledge she has never denounced anyone to the enemy or caused any harm to patriots. She has a reputation for loose morals. She is separated from her husband. She was shaved like many other women from the locality for having probably had sexual relations with German soldiers during the Occupation, and in my view she does not deserve to be rehabilitated.89

  In this case it was clearly a style of life which was being punished as much as any crime, rather as the female abortionist executed by Vichy was punished as much for who she was as what she had done. Abortion could also be an aggravating circumstance at the Liberation. Of one woman who had her head shaved in the Charente-Maritime it was said: ‘she is rumoured to have had an abortion. It is well known that she frequented Germans.’90

  The punishment of women at the Liberation for having transgressed traditional boundaries of respectability occurred within the context of continuing concern about the birth rate. Natalism remained omnipresent in public discourse even if reference to the family tended to be less pervasive than under Vichy.91 In a speech in March 1945 de Gaulle called for ‘twelve million beautiful babies’; the Communist UFF declared in June that ‘France needs children’. In May 1945 the Ministry of the Interior exhorted prefects to give prominence to Mother’s Day. Although the death penalty for abortion was removed, the 1920 anti-abortion law continued to be rigorously enforced. Prosecutions for abortion increased, and magistrates often meted out sentences of up to four years’ imprisonment. In short, women after 1944 continued to be viewed as reproducers not producers.92 In that respect little had changed.

  Attitudes towards race and immigration also changed less than might have been expected. Immigration was one of the subjects discussed by the new Committee on Population and the Family set up in April 1945 to study the demographic problem. Its secretary, Georges Mauco, was recognized as an expert on immigration, and had acted as an adviser on immigration to Daladier’s government in 1938. A member of the PPF from 1940, Mauco was one of the relatively small band of French racial theorists. During the Occupation he had published two articles in Montandon’s Ethnie française, arguing that Jews were the least desirable of all immigrant groups. Their ‘servile and obsequious’ nature had contributed to ‘devirilizing’ France. Somehow Mauco, who resigned from the PPF in November 1942, succeeded in dissociating himself from Montandon (who was assassinated by the Resistance in August 1944) and even invented a Resistance reputation for himself in the nick of time.93 Other members of the post-Liberation Committee on Population included the irrepressible natalist Fernand Boverat, and the statistician and demographer Alfred Sauvy. Sauvy was head of the newly created National Institute for the Study of Demography (INED) which was in fact a continuation, under a new name, of the Fondation Carrel.94

  On the Committee, Mauco argued for a selective immigration policy operating according to strictly ethnic criteria. Sauvy, whose priority was to increase France’s population at any cost, opposed this. Even if in the end Mauco’s line did not prevail, Sauvy’s racial assumptions were not so different. In 1946 Sauvy published a book on the population problem with the paediatrician and former resister Robert Debré. Their chapter on immigration acknowledged its debt to the work of Mauco. While accepting the need for large-scale immigration they wanted priority to be given to those most likely to assimilate easily into French civilization. This meant preferring northerners to ‘credulous and fatalistic Arabs or… crafty Levantines’. Immigrants should be dispersed so as to avoid any replica of the ‘little Israelo-Oriental’ ghetto in central Paris.95 This was closer to the tone of Giraudoux’s Pleins pouvoirs in 1939 than one might expect from two leading spokesmen of the spirit of the ‘New France’. Similarly, the new legislation codifying the rules for French nationality was very much in line with the discriminatory legislation of the late 1930s. Newly naturalized citizens were excluded from elective office for ten years and from full civic rights for five. Naturalization was only possible for those who had demonstrated their ‘assimilation into the French community’—the first time this had been explicitly written into the law—providing it was clear that their ‘state of physical health’ meant that they would not be a ‘burden or a danger for the collectivity’.96

  Thus although the post-Liberation government abolished all Vichy’s discriminatory legislation against Jews, the terms in which nationality was discussed did not represent a total break with the past. Little was said after 1944 about the important role which foreigners had played in the Resistance. But to the extent that this was a betrayal of the pluralistic identity of the Resistance, it was a betrayal in which resisters were themselves complicit. The rhetoric of the Resistance had always tended to stress unity over diversity. The most open acknowledgement of the role of immigrants had come from the Communists, but they retreated from this position after 1945 in their attempt to portray themselves as France’s truly national party. Writing in L’Humanité in August 1945 after the
liberation of the camp of Majdanek, Maurice Thorez declared of the victims that their names were ‘redolent of the old French countryside… names of Bretons and Alsatians, Flemish and Corsican names, Norman and Provençal names… French names’.97 In 1946, the FTP published a collection of letters from martyred Communists, Lettres de fusillés, which included some written by members of the FTP-MOI. Another edition of the same work in 1951, under the slightly different title Lettres de communistes fusillés, with a preface by Aragon, no longer contained any FTP-MOI names. Foreigners disappeared posthumously from the Resistance.

  It is not surprising that liberation was accompanied by a discourse of national unity which privileged unity over diversity, but this made the Liberation in some respects, if not a ‘restoration’, to use Bourdet’s term, at least a moment of closure, as much as one of renewal. The Resistance had celebrated France’s regional diversity, but this did not result in any questioning of the centralized traditions of the republican State. Regionalism was too discredited by its Vichyite associations. The issue of decentralization did come to the fore in 1947 after the publication of the influential book ‘Paris and the French Desert’ by Jean-François Gravier.98 It is often forgotten that during the Occupation Gravier had run Marion’s school for training propaganda delegates, and he had already written a book on the issue of regionalism in 1942.99 Although the word regionalism was taboo after 1944, cultural decentralization was viewed positively. It was inspired by the idea that French education was too narrowly intellectual and too elitist: it must be democratized and broadened.100 These ideas were embodied in the organization Peuple et culture (People and Culture) which attracted the support of many intellectuals. Such initiatives were inspired by the Popular Front, but also by Jeune France and Uriage. Jean Vilar, founder of the Avignon festival in 1947 and presiding influence over the decentralization of French theatre after the Liberation, had worked for Jeune France.101 Joffre Dumazadier, the founder of Peuple et culture, had taught at Uriage.