Nothing better illustrated the impossibility of defining a single resistance line in the post-war years than the problem of Algeria. Some resisters, like Claude Bourdet, were in the forefront of the anti-colonialist movement; others, like Georges Bidault, were fervently committed to the French Empire in Algeria. Both claimed to be defending the values of the Resistance. Bourdet believed that the French army in Algeria was perpetrating crimes similar to those committed by the Germans in France during the war; Bidault believed that those who wanted to abandon Algeria were no better than those who had abandoned France to the Germans in 1940. Having been president of the National Council of the Resistance in 1944–5, Bidault announced in 1961 that he was setting up a new Resistance council—this time to fight for French Algeria.21
Dissenting Memories II: Pétainists and Collaborators
These divisions within the Resistance assisted the rehabilitation of former Pétainists or collaborators. Paulhan’s denunciation of the excesses of the purges was a balm to the former victims of those purges. Many former Pétainists, who were ardently committed to the defence of French Algeria, suddenly became patriots in the eyes of people who would once have designated them as traitors, and whom they would have designated as terrorists. Now both agreed that the ‘terrorists’ were to be found in Algeria.
The rehabilitation of former Pétainists had commenced several years earlier. An amnesty law in January 1951 reduced the numbers in prison from 40,000 to 1,570. After a second amnesty in July 1953, only 62 prisoners remained.22 These two laws had been sponsored by Catholic resisters like Edmond Michelet in a spirit of national reconciliation. At the same time, however, the political pendulum swung towards the right after the onset of the Cold War. This allowed Vichy ghosts to re-emerge. Jean Jardin, who had headed Laval’s cabinet from April 1942 to October 1943, became an influential behind-the-scenes figure in Fourth Republic politics.23 So too did Georges Albertini, who had been Marcel Déat’s right-hand man at the head of the RNP.24 In March 1952, the conservative politician Antoine Pinay became prime minister. Pinay had been appointed to sit on Vicky’s Conseil national, and his elevation to the premiership breached an important taboo.
Pinay, who cannot be described as a hard-line Pétainist, was interested in putting the past behind him, and playing the game of Fourth Republic politics. There were, however, many Vichy survivors who wanted to profit from the changed political climate to challenge the prevailing Resistance orthodoxy. They began to publish in a number of small circulation extreme-right newspapers which emerged to provide a platform for the defeated of 1944 (Écrits de Paris, 1947, Rivarol, 1951). Those who set about the task of rehabilitation adopted two strategies. The first was to discredit the alleged excesses of the Liberation by depicting the purges as a bloodbath—a new Terror—with up to 100,000 victims. Instead of attacking the Resistance directly, these writers coined the term ‘resistentialism’ to describe pseudo-resisters who had profited from the Liberation to unleash class war or carry out personal vendettas. Les Crimes masqués du résistentialisme (1948, The Hidden Crimes of Resistentialism), by the conservative député Abbé Desgranges, was an early example of the genre.25 A literary representation of this counter-myth was Marcel Aymé’s novel Uranus (1948), a pitiless depiction of the Liberation in a small town. Uranus is populated by corrupt black marketeers, who convert to resistance at the last moment; sanguinary Communists, who exercise arbitrary tyranny over innocent citizens; and disillusioned hypocrites, who accommodate themselves cynically to the prevailing hypocrisy.26
A second strategy of rehabilitation was to separate Pétain’s reputation from that of Laval. Louis Rougier published a book on his mission to London in which he claimed that Pétain had been playing a double game. The title of Louis-Dominique Girard’s Montoire: Verdun diplomatique (1948, Montoire: A Diplomatic Verdun) speaks for itself. These authors argued that de Gaulle and Pétain were two sides of the same patriotic coin: the sword and the shield. After Pétain’s death in 1951, at the age of 95, his supporters set up the Association to Defend the Memory of Marshal Pétain (ADMP), of which Rémy was a founding member. The ADMP lobbied, and has done ever since, for a judicial review of the Pétain trial, and for the Marshal’s remains to be buried at Douaumont, near Verdun. Although never having more than a few thousand members, the ADMP’s board of directors has over the years included twenty-two former ministers and twelve members of the Académie française.27
The Resistance myths were challenged not only by Vichy survivors, but also by a group of writers, known as the Hussards, who were mostly too young to have been personally implicated in collaboration. Reacting against what they saw as the stifling political correctness of Resistance orthodoxy, they rejected the whole idea of political ‘engagement’. In Roger Nimier’s Le Hussard bleu (1950), one of the characters is a resister who is sent to infiltrate the Milice and discovers that its members share the same values of comradeship and courage as the Resistance. In Antoine Blondin’s picaresque L’Europe buissonière (1949) the hero lives through the battle of France, the Resistance, STO, and the Liberation. Instead of choices and clear moral values, he finds only absurdity and arbitrariness, rather like the hero of Céline’s Voyage to the End of the Night. The Hussards aimed to shock by adopting a debunking stance of frivolity and cynicism. They championed compromised writers like Cocteau, Morand, Chardonne, and Drieu.28
Writers whose reputations had once seemed irremediably tainted gradually re-emerged from purgatory. Lucien Rebatet who left prison in 1952 resumed writing film criticism which was much admired by the young François Truffaut. Georges Soulès became a successful novelist writing under the pseudonym of Raymond Abellio. Céline, returning to France from his Danish exile in 1951, resumed his novelistic career, and adopted the persona of an irascible and victimized eccentric who had never wished harm to anyone. Paul Morand returned to France in 1954, and embarked on a campaign to get into the Académie française. His election was blocked in 1959 by the combined efforts of former resisters and de Gaulle himself, but he finally succeeded in 1968.29 Robert Brasillach, who was saved from this fate by his execution, became the object of a tiny cult orchestrated by his brother-in-law, Maurice Bardèche.
Bardèche became France’s most articulate defender of fascism. This should remind us that the defeated of 1944 did not all share the same vision of the past. The wartime division between Vichy and Paris continued in the post-war period, separating those who defended Pétain as a French patriot, and those who defended Laval as a European and anti-Communist. Déat, who lived out his days teaching French in Italy, still believed that his day would come.30 Pierre-André Cousteau, a former member of the Je suis partout team, remained unrepentant until the end of his life. In 1958, he wrote: ‘if I adopted, in 1941, an attitude of collaboration, it was not to limit the damage … or play some kind of double game. It was because I wanted the victory of Germany … because it represented … the last chance of the white man, while the democracies … represented the end of the white man.’31
Buried Memories: The Victims
It was only to be expected that the Gaullist myth had little comfort to offer the defeated of 1944, but it had little place either for those who had been persecuted under the Occupation—especially the thousands of civilians who had been deported to Germany. The return of déportés from German camps in April 1945 had caused a terrible shock. The sight of these ghostly and emaciated creatures cast a pall over the victory celebrations. Nor was it easy to fit them into the embryonic Gaullist interpretation of the Occupation which required heroes not victims. On 11 November 1945, a solemn ceremony was held at the fort of Mont Valérien outside Paris where many French hostages had been shot by the Germans: fifteen people who had died for France were buried in a crypt there. They consisted of nine soldiers who had fought in 1940 or in 1944, one prisoner of war shot while trying to escape, three resisters, and two déportés, both of whom had been resisters. There was no representative of those déportés who had simply been victi
ms of the Germans although not involved in the Resistance.
In the face of this official neglect, various associations of déportés kept alive the memory of their experiences. In 1954, they succeeded in getting parliament to vote for an annual National Deportation Day every April. On the first of these occasions, an urn containing the ashes of déportés was transferred to Mont Valérien to join the remains of the fifteen people already buried there, and reap-propriate the site from the exclusively heroic memory ascribed to it by de Gaulle. But this battle of memory between heroes and victims rumbled on. On 18 June 1960, two years after returning to power, de Gaulle inaugurated a grandiose Monument to Fighting France at Mont Valérien. Two years later, the associations of déportés obtained the construction of a specific monument to the Martyrs of Deportation. This monument, situated at the tip of the Île de la Cité in Paris, was inaugurated by de Gaulle on National Deportation Day in 1962.32
In the hierarchy of virtue in post-war France, the deportees had come to occupy a central place only just below the resisters. They symbolized the suffering of the French nation in the war, and were depicted as having been spiritually purified by their terrible experiences in the camps.33 They stood in the same relation to post-war society as the prisoners of war in relation to Vichy. But the community of déportés was itself far from homogeneous. In 1948, their status was fixed by law. Two categories were distinguished: the déportés résistants who had been deported as a result of their Resistance activities and the déportés politiques who had been entirely innocent victims of the Germans, such as civilian hostages taken in reprisal for Resistance operations. Those who had been sent to Germany as STO workers were, however, not granted déporté status at all. They were seen as much less deserving of either admiration or sympathy than the déportés. When in 1956 it was mooted that former STO workers should be granted déporté status, a number of leading personalities—including Vercors, Lucien Febvre, Camus, Fernand Braudel—signed a declaration of protest about honouring these ‘transplantés’ in such a way.34 The former STO workers much resented this implied assumption that they were not victims in the same way as the other déportés politiques, especially since during the war it had been common to refer to them as déportés de travail. But no amount of lobbying has so far succeeded in winning them back this designation. Over those who had worked in Nazi Germany floats the suspicion that they could—or should—have avoided STO and joined the Resistance.35
Another group not accorded any specific recognition among déportés were the Jews. When the first Jewish survivors returned from the camps in 1945 their plight was not differentiated in public consciousness from that of other victims of Nazism. In June 1946, the ashes of Auschwitz victims were buried at Père-Lachaise in a ceremony organized by the Communists. The monument erected on this occasion referred to ‘men, women and children, deported from France, exterminated at Auschwitz, victims of Nazi barbarism’. Nothing said that almost all the victims had been Jewish. One deportation convoy to Auschwitz, that of 23 January 1943, had in fact contained 119 Communist women, the only non-Jewish women to be sent to Auschwitz. Through the testimony of the survivors of that convoy, Auschwitz merged into the general memory of all the concentration camps with no recognition of its specific character as a centre of extermination. It was appropriated as a Communist memory not a Jewish one.36 The Jews who returned to France were subsumed into the category of déportés politiques and not viewed with particular sympathy. When after her return from Auschwitz the 17-year-old Jewish girl Simone Jacob—now the politician Simone Veil—presented herself for a medical examination at the National Federation of Resistance Deportees, she was sent away as ineligible.37
Jewish survivors who tried to speak about their experiences often found that others, including Jews who had survived the war in France, did not wish to listen.38 As one returning deportee remarked: ‘No sooner did we begin to tell our story than we were interrupted, like overexcited or overly talkative children by parents who are themselves burdened down with real problems.’39 Jewish organizations readily subscribed to this collective amnesia. To admit a special category of ‘racial deportees’ contradicted the assimilationist tradition of the Republic to which the Jews owed their freedom in France. Most Jews wanted to put the nightmare behind them and fit back into French society.
A memorial to the dead was unveiled in Paris at the synagogue of the rue de la Victoire in 1949 in the presence of the President of the Republic. The ceremony, ending with the Marseillaise, was as much a Republican as a Jewish one reflecting the Jews’ desire to avoid difficult questions about France’s role in their wartime fate. At a meeting of the Consistory of Paris in 1946, one speaker paid homage to the people of France ‘to whom we owe our survival … France who liberated us in 1789 liberated us again in 1944’.40 Speaking on 14 July 1945, the Chief Rabbi Joseph Kaplan declared: ‘the government of Vichy which abandoned the Jews and delivered them to their fate did not represent the true France’. As for those non-French Jews who had participated in the Resistance, mainly through the Communist MOI, they were remembered as members of the FTP who died for France. The MOI, which was wound up in 1945, faded from memory.41
Fragmented Memories
In the 1970s, the glacier of official memory began to break up as a result of two developments: the generational revolt of the 1960s and a reawakening of Jewish self-consciousness. The generational revolt had its most violent expression in the events of 1968 when French students challenged the two political forces whose legitimacy was most closely bound up with the memory of the war: Gaullism and communism. They hurled memories of the past against those who portrayed themselves as custodians of that past. Their slogan comparing the French riot police to the Nazis—‘CRS = SS’—shocked defenders of the Gaullist regime. When the Communist leader Georges Marchais dismissed one student activist as a ‘German Jewish anarchist’, the students responded with the slogan ‘We are all German Jews’.
This climate of protest explains the impact of the film The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) which subverted every aspect of the myth of the Occupation. Not least of its provocations was the almost total absence of de Gaulle. Constructed around interviews with survivors from the period, the film was as much an exploration of the memory of the Occupation as a history of it. In refusing to allow The Sorrow and the Pity to be televised, the head of France’s State broadcasting organization remarked that ‘certain myths are necessary for a people’s well-being and tranquillity’. But the ban only fuelled suspicions that there was something to hide. The film was shown in a Paris cinema, and seen by about 600,000 people. After it, nothing was ever the same again.42
The awakening of Jewish memory was part of the same generational phenomenon which produced The Sorrow and the Pity, but it had other causes as well. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 revived interest in the Holocaust while the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab States increased the sense of self-consciousness among Jews in France, especially after the French government distanced itself from the Israeli cause. In 1977, the main organization of French Jewry, the CRIF, modified its charter to embrace the objectives of unconditional support for Israel and the demand that French schools offer instruction on the Holocaust. Claude Lanzmann’s eight-hour documentary film on the Holocaust, Shoah (1985), played the same role for Jewish memory during the 1980s as The Sorrow and the Pity had for the general memory of the Occupation during the 1970s.43
No one did more to raise public self-consciousness about war-time anti-Semitism than the lawyer Serge Klarsfeld who was 8 years old when his father was deported to Auschwitz in 1943. With his younger German wife Beate, Klarsfeld devoted himself to hunting down war criminals. In 1968, Beate publicly slapped the German chancellor Kurt Kiesinger to draw attention to his Nazi past. Klarsfeld also became a considerable historian. His Vichy-Auschwitz traced the mechanisms of the Final Solution in France; his Mémorial de la déportation des juifs de France published the name of every Jew deported from France. In 1979, he
created the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France.
As the Resistance was challenged during the 1970s, incidents that might once have passed unnoticed exploded into scandal. This was discovered, to his cost, by de Gaulle’s successor President Georges Pompidou. In November 1971, Pompidou quietly (as he had hoped) granted a pardon to the former Milice leader in Lyons, Paul Touvier. After the war, Touvier had been sentenced to death in absentia, but successfully evaded arrest. For twenty years, he was hidden by Catholic clergymen, acting out of a mixture of charity and right-wing conviction. In 1967, the death sentence lapsed when the Statute of Limitations took effect. Pompidou’s pardon affected various secondary penalties that still carried force.
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