Many of those who had worked at Uriage enjoyed greater intellectual influence, especially in journalism and publishing, after the Liberation than they had ever done under Vichy. Of no one was this more true than of Hubert Beuve-Méry, founding editor of the new newspaper Le Monde in 1945. Under Beuve-Méry’s austere leadership, Le Monde’s editorial team in the early days was inhabited by the same exalted sense of mission which had inspired Uriage. But it was also true that while most of the former Resistance press eventually succumbed to internal squabbles or financial difficulties, Le Monde became probably the post-war institution which most perfectly embodied the rigorous ethical values of the Resistance. That it took a former Pétainist to prolong the mystique of the Resistance into the post-war world is not the least of the paradoxes of this period. It is the existence of such contradictions and cross-currents which makes the memory and the inheritance of the Dark Years so complex, and so difficult to confront even in the France of today.
Epilogue: Remembering the Occupation
In January 1945, the conservative newspaper Le Figaro launched a campaign for the remains of Charles Péguy to be transferred to the Panthéon. This idea was a response to a Communist campaign for the ‘pantheonization’ of the recently deceased writer Romain Rolland who had been France’s most famous fellow-travelling intellectual and an opponent of appeasement in the 1930s. Another proposal, from the Christian Democrat newspaper L’Aube, was that both Péguy and Rolland should be pantheonized, along with the philosopher Henri Bergson, who had been one of the maîtres à penser of Péguy.
What did these three figures symbolize? Péguy represented a link between the patriotism of 1914 and that of 1944; Rolland a link between the anti-fascism of the 1930s and that of the Resistance; Bergson a reminder of the contribution of Jews to French culture. But other messages could also be read into their lives: Péguy’s name had been exploited by Vichy; Rolland had been a pacifist during the First World War; Bergson had moved towards Catholicism at the end of his life.1 In the end, no one was transferred to the Panthéon in 1945, but these debates were only the first skirmishes in what was to be a long battle to claim the inheritance of the Resistance, a battle which was itself only the beginning of a longer war of memory over the Occupation.
Constructing Memory
No one was quicker off the mark to claim the inheritance of the Resistance than the Communists. Dubbing themselves the Party of the 75,000 martyrs, the Communists presented themselves as the true inheritors of the patriotic tradition of the French Revolution. In fact, the total number of French shot by the Germans was nearer 35,000, and not all of these were Communists. But by force of repetition, the figure of 75,000 attained a sort of poetic truth—and it was undeniable that the Communists had suffered higher casualties than any other Resistance group. Within weeks of the Liberation, the Communists were orchestrating ceremonies in memory of their martyrs. There was one at the cemetery of Ivry on 6 October 1944 and another at Père-Lachaise two days later. Eighteen squares or streets in Paris were almost immediately renamed after Communist martyrs.2 The Resistance has remained central to the mythology of the Party ever since.
It is no less central to the mythology of Gaullism. De Gaulle’s aim in 1944 was to reunite the nation and restore its self-respect. This involved the construction of the myth that, despite a few traitors, the French nation, united behind de Gaulle, had liberated itself. On 14 June 1944, in his first speech on liberated French territory, de Gaulle assured the peaceable and bemused inhabitants of Bayeux of his confidence that they would ‘continue the struggle today, as you have not ceased to do since June 1940’.3 In this interpretation of history, Vichy was an episode best forgotten once the necessary trials had taken place. This was the logic of the CFLN Ordinance of 9 August 1944 declaring all legislation enacted in France since 16 June 1940 null and void. What occurred between 1939 and 1944 was represented not as a French civil war, but as an episode in a longer struggle against Germany. On 2 April 1945, de Gaulle talked of a ‘thirty years’ war’ which had started in 1914. A plaque unveiled in memory of Mandel in 1946 proclaimed that he had been ‘murdered by the enemies of France’—without specifying that those enemies had been French.4
It would be wrong to see this emerging resistance mythology as having been constructed entirely from above. Many local communities quickly developed their own Resistance liturgies, celebrated their own heroes, and mourned their own martyrs. This was the case, for example, of the small market town of Saint-Flour, in the Cantal, which was one of the localities where the Germans had exacted reprisals after the failed Maquis uprising at Mont Mouchet. Twenty-five men were shot in the back on 14 June on a bridge near the town. After the Liberation the road leading to the bridge was renamed the Avenue des Martyrs, and a memorial was built in their memory. Among the victims was Pierre Mallet, son of the local doctor, Louis Mallet, who was in the Resistance. Shortly afterwards Louis Mallet himself was captured by the Germans, and he and another of his sons were shot along with other resisters on 24 June. After the Liberation, Mallet became the object of an intense local Resistance cult. The avenue Maréchal Pétain was renamed avenue Dr Louis Mallet and a local Day of Remembrance was instituted on the anniversary of his death. When de Gaulle visited the region on 1 July 1945 he spent fifteen minutes in Saint-Flour and presented Mallet’s widow with a posthumous Croix de Guerre for her husband. In June 1946 she was chosen to unveil the Monument to the Glory of the French maquisards at Mont Mouchet. In such ways did small towns like Saint-Flour insert themselves into the grand national narrative of the Resistance.5
At the national level the Resistance myth was orchestrated separately by de Gaulle and by the Communists. For all their differences, they both agreed on one thing: the Resistance had represented the real France and incarnated the true feelings of the French people throughout the Occupation. This reassuring myth did, however, cause some problems to both of them, especially in its early stages. For the Communists it was important to prevent the Resistance generation claiming superiority over those leaders who had been in place before 1939—not least Maurice Thorez, who had spent the war in Moscow, and played no part in the Resistance. At the Party’s XIIth Congress in 1950, fourteen major resisters were dropped from the Central Committee; 1952 saw the demotion of the former head of the FTP, Charles Tillon. Tillon’s long-awaited history of the FTP, which was ready in 1952, did not appear until 1962 because the Party insisted on amendments. In short, the Party preferred its Resistance heroes dead to alive.6
De Gaulle’s problem was slightly different. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he had adopted an increasingly right-wing political stance at the head of the violently anti-Communist movement the RPF. Inevitably many members of this movement were Pétainists and de Gaulle did not want to alienate them by harping endlessly on the past. He even made some favourable references at this time to the services Pétain had once rendered to France, and intimated his belief that it was cruel for the old man to languish in prison. But there were limits to how far he was prepared to go down this road. In 1950 the Resistance hero Colonel Rémy, himself a founding member of the RPF, published an article claiming that de Gaulle had confided to him that in June 1940 France had needed two strings to her bow, the Pétain string and the de Gaulle string. This was too much for de Gaulle and he wrote to Rémy expressing his outrage, but interestingly enough he never publicly denied Rémy’s allegation.7
After de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, there was no obstacle to the full development of the myth of the Resistance, officially consecrated by the transfer of Moulin’s remains to the Panthéon. In the immediate post-war years, Brossolette’s memory had been more celebrated than Moulin’s, but as representative in 1942–3 of the embryonic Gaullist State, Moulin ultimately turned out a more suitable symbol for the Gaullist regime.8 The high priest of the pantheonization ceremony for Moulin was André Malraux, de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture. As Henry Rousso writes, Malraux’s speech offered a simple syllogism: the Resistance
equals de Gaulle; de Gaulle equals France; France equals the Resistance. Even Communist resisters like Rol-Tanguy participated in the ceremony. L’Humanité was not without criticisms of the occasion, but in the end its reaction was positive: ‘Honour to Jean Moulin! Honour to those who, following his example, died for their country! Honour to the French Resistance!’9
The way that the myth of the Resistance squeezed out alternative readings of the Occupation emerges particularly clearly in the cinema.10 Films in the immediate post-war period had offered no unified image of the Occupation. At the Liberation, there was a flurry of films celebrating the Resistance: La Bataille du rail (1946) depicted the heroism of the working class, in the form of railway workers, and Le Père tranquille (1946) the heroism of the Français moyen, in the form of a peaceable insurance agent who is also secretly a resister. But the Resistance passed from fashion on the screen in the early 1950s, and the public was soon offered more complex images of the Occupation. Rene Clément’s Jeux inderdits (1952) was an unsettling story about two small children traumatized by the war. André Cayatte’s Nous sommes tous des assassins (1951) was about a young man who, having started killing for the Resistance, is unable to stop after the war. What made the film especially disturbing was that his original commitment to the Resistance had no political or patriotic motives: he could just as easily have killed for the other side. Not surprisingly, the film was disliked by the Communists and by former resisters like the historian Henri Michel. Another far from heroic vision of the Occupation was portrayed in La Traversée de Paris (1956) based on a story by Marcel Aymé. Starring two of the most famous actors of the period, Jean Gabin and Bourvil, the film depicts the adventures of two men transporting a black-market pig across Paris.
Censorship intervened if depictions of the Occupation too dramatically contradicted the official myth. The film La Neige était sale (1954), based on a novel by Simenon, presented such a bleak view that the censors insisted it be set in an imaginary country. Jean Dewever’s Les Honneurs de la guerre (1962) had to undergo several changes before it could be released: the role of the Milice had to be played down, as did a suggestion that the French police had worked for the Germans. The most blatant example of censorship occurred in 1956 when an image of a French policeman participating in the arrest of Jews had to be cut from Alain Resnais’s documentary film about concentration camps, Night and Fog. What made this case particularly flagrant was the fact that it concerned not a fictional representation but an authentic photograph from the period.
In the 1960s, the Resistance came back into fashion in the cinema and most films now faithfully echoed the Resistance myth. In 1966, the Resistance was treated in the comedy La Grande Vadrouille, one of the most successful French films of all time. Starring France’s two most famous comic actors, Bourvil and Louis de Funès, it tells the story of two ‘ordinary’ Frenchmen—one a house painter, the other a conductor—who only want to get on with their lives but find themselves helping an English pilot (Terry Thomas) escape to the Southern Zone. The moral is that, when necessary, the ordinary Frenchman will do his duty. Nineteen sixty-seven was the year of René Clément’s Paris brûle-t-il? in which an all-star international cast presented a Gaullist vision of the Liberation of Paris. Finally, in 1969, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Armée des ombres offered an epic vision of the internal Resistance united behind de Gaulle. In this film the real Colonel Passy even makes a brief appearance, playing himself; the Communists are barely mentioned.
Dissenting Memories I: The Resistance
It is easy enough to describe the official memory of the war, but difficult to know how universally it was endorsed. The idea that there was ever a consensus around the myth is probably a myth itself. Any society’s collective memory is an amalgam of officially constructed memories, specific group memories, individual personal memories, and all the other sources upon which people draw for their images of the past (films, fiction, historical writing).11 The main problem with the Resistance myth was that it imposed a unitary vision on what had been highly fragmented experience. This fragmentation was vividly demonstrated in 1953 when twenty-one ex-members of the Das Reich Division, which had carried out the Oradour massacre, were tried in Bordeaux. The trial aroused great emotion, not only because Oradour had been elevated into an official monument to Nazi barbarism, but because thirteen of the defendants were Alsatians who had been forcibly drafted into the German army (as ‘malgré nous’). Southwest France saw them as war criminals; Alsace saw them as war victims. In the end, the Alsatians were amnestied—to the fury of the survivors of Oradour.12
The Oradour trial was a case that did not fit the simple categories of the official myth, but it was far from the only one. What did the non-Communist Resistance feel about the role it was assigned by the Gaullists and Communists? How did the 1.5 million prisoners of war fit into the heroic vision? What about the 650,000 workers who were forced to work in German factories? What about the Jews? What about the varieties of regional memory (of which the Oradour trial was only one example)? What about people who had supported Vichy and were not ashamed of it?
Unlike the Great War, the memory of the Second World War in France is not preserved in single memorials at the heart of local communities; it is dispersed and fragmented. FFI fighters and Free French fighters, those shot as hostages and those exterminated as Jews, prisoners of war and political deportees: all have their own memorials.13 There was no consensus even about which day should be selected to commemorate France’s victory and Liberation. In 1945 the official German surrender on 8 May was not a day of great celebration in France. Despite de Gaulle’s success in ensuring a French presence at the surrender of Germany, the victory could not efface memories of 1940. As de Gaulle declared: ‘our satisfaction at the outcome of the war still leaves—and will always do so!—a dull pain in the depths of our national consciousness’. Another date to commemorate might have been 18 June, but its associations were too specifically Gaullist. Instead the main celebration organized in 1945 occurred on 11 November, as if the ambiguity which hovered over the victory of 1945 could be subsumed into the victory of 1918. This underscored de Gaulle’s theme of continuity between the two conflicts: the thirty years’ war.14
Resisters, however, wanted a specific commemoration of the Second War, and in 1946 they obtained partial satisfaction when the Sunday following 8 May was declared a national holiday. In 1953 this concession was extended further when 8 May itself became a holiday. After de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, this decision was reversed and the victory was again commemorated on the Sunday nearest to 8 May. This annoyed former resisters who continued to celebrate 8 May, and they got their way in 1968 when 8 May once again became a holiday. Nonetheless 8 May never caught on in the popular imagination in the same way as 11 November.15
Former resisters not only resented any attempt to downplay the significance of the period 1940–4 by subsuming it in a ‘thirty years’ war’, they were also uneasy with the idea of associating the majority of the population with the Resistance. They were reluctant to sacrifice their sense of having being an elite in a society initially indifferent, even hostile, to them. As a former resister wrote in 1955: ‘it is time to unmask a pious myth which has not really deceived anyone. The great majority of the people of this country played only a small and fleeting part in the events. Their activity was passive, except at the last moments. In these circumstances how can one require them to keep a faithful memory?’16 Of course de Gaulle was no less aware that the resisters had been a tiny minority, but for him this truth was best overlooked in the cause of healing the divisions of the nation and restoring France’s reputation abroad. For the Resistance, whose objectives had been as much moral as political, the renewal of France could not be built on a lie; for de Gaulle, raison d’état required nothing less.
Among many resisters the sense of betrayal which had emerged soon after the Liberation intensified in the following years. Jean Cassou wrote in 1953 that ‘nothing remains of the
spirit of the Resistance’.17 It would be wrong, however, to deduce from such remarks that the Resistance generation had been excluded from positions of influence in post-war France. Former resisters like Bidault, Pineau, Mitterrand, Teitgen, Michelet, Claudius-Petit, Debré, Chaban-Delmas, and Defferre were major players in the politics of the Fourth Republic.18 Why, then, was there a feeling of betrayal? Whatever the individual role of resisters in politics after 1945, there was no official representation of the Resistance in French society. The UDSR, which had originally hoped to play such a role, soon ended up as a small centrist grouping in parliament, skilled in the arts of compromise, but as removed from the intransigent purity of the Resistance as it was possible to be. It was in this party that François Mitterrand honed the arts of political intrigue and manoeuvre that would serve him so well in the future.
Some resisters were disillusioned by the arbitrariness of the post-war purges and the way in which the Communists tried to monopolize the memory of the Resistance. Jean Paulhan’s repudiation of his former Resistance comrades was sealed in his violent polemic Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance (1952). There were self-conscious echoes of Péguy’s break with his former Dreyfusard comrades. During the war, Paulhan had worked with Aragon in the literary Resistance; Aragon’s wife, Elsa Triolet, denounced him as a Nazi.19 Even Mauriac felt that Paulhan, whose views he had shared in 1944, had now gone too far: he was giving ammunition to the Rebatets and Célines who remained as full of hatred as they had always been.20 The truth was that the ideals of the Resistance did not provide unambiguous answers to the problems of the post-war world. Many Resistance newspapers continued after the Liberation, but their existence was increasingly compromised by acrimonious quarrels over the correct editorial line. Franc-Tireur folded in 1958. The former editors of Défense de la France (which renamed itself France-Soir) were hardly on speaking terms by 1945, and the paper, which soon suffered major financial difficulties, was taken over by the press group Hachette in 1950.
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