The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  In the months after the Liberation, the various tendencies in the Resistance drifted apart as the unity of purpose that had held them together evaporated. Frenay and d’Astier dreamed of founding a ‘Resistance party’ that would build on the comradeship and self-sacrifice they had experienced during the war. But their new party was soon sidelined by the Communist Party and by the Gaullists, each claiming the mantle of the Resistance, each rewriting history in their own image. The clearest example of the transformation of comradeship into outright political hatred was focused on Henri Frenay. In 1945 he was forced to resign as minister in charge of repatriating French POWs following a scurrilous Communist campaign that had the connivance of a Vichy POW leader who had gone over to the Resistance, François Mitterrand. Even de Gaulle was temporarily ushered from the political scene, when the voters rejected his proposal for a new constitution based on a strong presidency. In 1945 the British electorate turned their back on their war-time leader; in 1946 the French did the same.

  And that was that. In 1945–6, as the first glimmers of the Cold War replaced the tension and excitement of clandestinity and Occupation, as hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war returned to their homes and the shattered survivors of the concentration camps attempted to make sense of life, the Resistance faded as a political force. In the decisive political events that shook France over the next few years, as Gaullists and Communists struggled to lead the country in conditions of political and economic crisis, the Resistance was nowhere to be seen.

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  As it disappeared from the stage of history, the Resistance was transformed into a myth. Not in the sense of a fiction, but a myth in the sense of a story that gave meaning and coherence to life. Its existence provided the tens of millions of French men and women who were not résistants with a symbol of what they ought to have done, a way of indirectly taking credit for the struggle. Honour was preserved, and the French integrated another example of rebellion into their proud history. The anti-Nazi Resistance, as much as the anti-monarchical Revolution of 1789, came to define France’s vision of itself.877 In this respect the situation in France was unique. Not only was it the only Western European country to have a Resistance movement of any size, unlike the two other European examples of large scale resistance – Greece and Yugoslavia – there was no civil war to colour or confuse how the past was seen.878

  With the passage of time, however, the details began to blur. A few years after the end of the war, there was a general amnesty for collaborationists, at which point the very existence of collaboration began to disappear from popular visions of the war. Even résistants participated in this process: in 1950, Rémy, the BCRA agent, claimed that ten years earlier France had needed both Pétain and de Gaulle, suggesting the two men were in some way complementary, and that Pétain was not a spineless collaborator.879 The recognition that less than five per cent of the population had actively resisted the Nazis was soon replaced by the impression that everyone had resisted. Just as de Gaulle had hoped, Vichy was simply overlooked – a ‘null and void’ piece of history that could be forgotten in the name of national unity. In a way, Frenay and d’Astier got what they wanted – the Resistance became a permanent part of French society, but as a dead structural feature, not in the active, comradely form they impossibly wished to preserve. At the same time, leading Resistance publications like Combat or Défense de la France soon found survival difficult in a world in which they had actually to sell copies and make a profit. By the end of the 1940s both newspapers had been sold, and had lost much of their initial radicalism (in the case of Défense de la France, it had also lost its title, becoming France-Soir, which still exists as an evening tabloid). The Resistance had all but disappeared.

  Emmanuel d’Astier had foreseen exactly this fate for the Resistance, in his song ‘La Complainte des Partisans’, written in 1943:

  Le vent souffle sur les tombes

  The wind is blowing over the tombs

  La liberté viendra

  Freedom is coming

  On nous oubliera

  We will be forgotten

  Nous rentrerons dans l’ombre

  We will return to the shadows880

  As the years passed, many ex-résistants were horrified to discover that the new country they fought so hard to create was using the techniques of repression and torture that they imagined were the mark of the Nazis. It had begun at the same moment as the Nazis were finally defeated. On 8 May 1945, as war ended in Europe and there were wild celebrations all over the continent, demonstrations in support of Algerian independence took place in French North Africa. In the towns of Constantine and Guelma, French troops were ordered to fire on the crowd. Rioting erupted throughout the region, and the government launched a vicious attack on the population, using ground troops and air attacks, before finally ordering a cruiser to bombard the area. The number of Algerian dead was officially put at 1,500; a French enquiry later raised that figure to 15,000, while the independentists claimed that 45,000 people were killed.881 Perhaps worse was to come nine years later, when the Algerian war of independence broke out and French soldiers carried out water-boarding, electrocutions and summary executions on their prisoners in a way that was no different from the Gestapo or their Milice henchmen. The moral high ground that had been gained by the sacrifice of the Resistance had been utterly lost.

  Outraged, many résistants launched themselves into a campaign of opposition to the war, and in support of the Algerian people. As well as a courageous press campaign, spearheaded by Claude Bourdet, some militants set up an underground support network for the Algerian FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale), smuggling money to help the cause. The events of the Occupation were being replayed in French North Africa, with the French state once again on the wrong side.882

  The Algerian war caused a profound political crisis in France, and in 1958 led to the return of de Gaulle, who immediately oversaw the creation of the kind of strong presidential regime he had dreamed of in 1946 but had been unable to obtain. De Gaulle’s first task was to oversee the withdrawal from Algeria and to face down an armed struggle by the most reactionary forces within the French military, who were determined to stop what they considered to be a betrayal. Politics being a contradictory beast, those forces included former CNR leader Georges Bidault who set up a new ‘CNR’ to oppose de Gaulle.883 Even Combat – still struggling on as a newspaper, and with the influence of Frenay and Bourdet long forgotten – was against the independence of Algeria.884

  As the political views of those who had made up the Resistance spread through the whole spectrum of French politics, its nature became less clear and popular visions of the Resistance became increasingly distorted. The influence of the Communist Party (by far the largest single party in French politics until the end of the 1970s), the weight of de Gaulle’s presidency (and of his war memoirs, published in the 1950s, which barely mentioned the Resistance), together with the ideological impact of the Cold War, all contributed to a polarization of views. For many people the Resistance soon became synonymous with the Communist Party and the FTP on the one hand and with the Free French on the other. Groups like Turma-Vengeance were soon forgotten, and eventually even Henri Frenay and Combat disappeared from the popular imagination. Although historians did their best to assemble oral histories of the Resistance, supported by an official Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (Committee for the History of the Second World War), and eventually began to publish a series of learned books on the subject, the public was more influenced by the black-and-white mythology that was building up.885 Commemorative postage stamps showing the faces of ‘heroes of the Resistance’ were issued, memorials were installed and local museums of resistance and deportation were created (although strikingly there was no national museum until the late 1980s). The rich detail of what the Resistance had been – and even who had been involved – gradually faded.

  As part of this process, radical Resistance action was slowly transformed into a
conservative symbol of the French state, through a series of official commemorations that presented a subtly selective view of the period. This culminated in the use of Jean Moulin to represent the whole of the Resistance. Forgotten in the post-war years, Moulin was metaphorically resurrected in December 1964, when his ashes were buried in a moving state ceremony at the Panthéon. André Malraux, who was Minister of Culture and had played a minor role in the final stages of the Resistance, made a speech at the Panthéon that has entered French history.886 The oration turned into a shamanic invocation of the spirit of the Resistance as Malraux, in a voice trembling with emotion and cracked by decades of tobacco abuse, described the terrible sacrifice made by Moulin and ‘the people of the shadows’.

  In closing, Malraux called on French youth to be inspired by Moulin’s devotion to his country, a call that was subsequently reinforced by the simple expedient of naming dozens of schools after him. From a purely functional point of view, Moulin was an ideal choice: a dead civil servant with no open political affiliations, he could be embraced by all as the unifier of the Resistance, even if his action had been the focus of ferocious struggles at the time. Moulin was unknown to the general public – indeed, in the immediate period after the war, even authoritative accounts of the Resistance put him very much in a subsidiary role behind Brossolette, who was generally seen as being the most significant of the many Resistance martyrs.887 But Brossolette was both a socialist and a man whose impact on the Resistance had at times been divisive – even if this was also true of Moulin, his decisive achievement was the unification of the Resistance and the creation of the CNR.

  After the publication of de Gaulle’s war memoirs in the 1950s, which, to the extent they dealt with the Resistance, emphasized Moulin’s work and barely mentioned Brossolette, Moulin began to take centre stage.888 He symbolized the Resistance because he served de Gaulle and helped to unify warring tendencies – behind his elevation there was a subliminal message of order and social peace. This view was shared on both sides of the political spectrum – when the socialist François Mitterrand became President in 1981, his first public act was to lay a red rose on Moulin’s tomb.889 Today, Moulin has become the face of the Resistance, known to millions. The complexities of a human being fighting under the most difficult circumstances, a man who was loathed by many of those who worked with him, have disappeared. Instead, the image of a real man with contradictory and sometimes mysterious motives has been blurred into the icon of a kind of national saint.

  As the Resistance was incorporated into the ideology of the French state, there was an inevitable tendency for a new generation to attack those symbols of power. This became particularly strong after May 1968, when young people rejected de Gaulle’s paternalistic and authoritarian view of France and rebelled against him, hurtfully identifying his CRS riot police with the Nazi Occupation through the chant ‘CRS-SS’.890 De Gaulle resigned in 1969 and died in 1970, shortly before his eightieth birthday. His death, coupled with the sweeping changes in French society that occurred after May 1968, opened the road to a re-examination of the war period. In 1971, at a time when the Resistance was the subject of comical French films and popular views of the war were literally descending into farce, the film-maker Marcel Ophüls shocked audiences with his four-and-a-half-hour documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which interviewed résistants and ordinary people about the Occupation and explored the reality of French collaboration. Although Ophüls’ film clearly showed the courage and sacrifice of the Resistance, its main impact came through its acceptance that French people had made choices during the occupation, and that some had chosen collaboration.891 Appearing at the same time as the first history of Vichy, written by US historian Robert Paxton, The Sorrow and the Pity helped re-open the wounds that had been plastered over twenty-five years earlier.

  Throughout this period, the Communist Party and the Gaullists struggled over the rights to the Resistance franchise, as ageing résistants and party political historians argued over who had done what and when. Much of this history was based on eyewitness interpretations that should have been concordant but which often contradicted each other. This was partly due to the inevitable unreliability of memory, but also because the political issues underlying the view of each résistant inevitably coloured what and how they remembered.892 These bitter squabbles faded as old résistants died and the Communists gradually lost their stranglehold on French intellectual and cultural life. One of the positive outcomes of these disputes was a substantial heritage in the form of a series of books and articles, including invaluable accounts of how various parts of the country were liberated. Strikingly, these were generally still written by the résistants themselves, and consisted of an uneasy combination of memoirs and historical self-justification. Finally, although there was initially no solid university tradition of academic study of the Resistance, that began to change in the 1970s.

  The appearance of detailed and more nuanced accounts of the Resistance irritated some résistants but satisfied others. Pascal Copeau was one of those who welcomed the way in which historians stepped away from the heroic narratives that had characterized popular views of the Resistance in the 1950s and 1960s, revealing a reality that was richer and more intricate than many people had thought. But even Copeau was concerned that the political heart of the Resistance should not suffer from this re-examination:

  It would do no harm to the comrades who were sacrificed if history was to say who was responsible for various false strategies. But we should be careful of going on to destroy all myths. The nature and strength of the Resistance are mythical. But myths, after all, can be action. Through appropriate and well-chosen actions, terrorism seeks literally to bluff the enemy by raising the spectre of a threat that is far greater than that which would exist if the two forces were to meet in open battle. It would perhaps be better to leave some legends intact, and not run the risk of distorting a complex truth.893

  In other words, while resisting was relatively straightforward (this was easy for Copeau to say), its consequences were complex and over the years had taken on important mythical qualities. These should be left unscathed, argued Copeau.

  Copeau’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The long period of soul-searching was expressed in a dark and cynical trend in French culture that openly rejected the Resistance myths. Louis Malle’s 1973 film Lacombe Lucien dealt with the amoral choices of a young milicien, while in the 1980s a series of French thrillers used fiction to reveal the truth behind the image that some politicians had so carefully cultivated and which the courts still protected. For example, Didier Daeninckx’s Murder in Memoriam (1984, translated in 1992) outlined Maurice Papon’s involvement in the deportation of Jews during the war and in the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, while Thierry Jonquet’s Du passé faisons table rase (1982) recounted how an ordinary French worker who had cheerfully volunteered to work in a Messerschmitt aero factory in 1942 ended up as leader of the French Communist Party, his past an embarrassing secret. This was exactly what happened to Georges Marchais, leader of the Communist Party from 1972 to 1994 and a major figure in French politics of the period, who persistently pretended that he had been conscripted as part of STO in order to preserve his Party’s Resistance myths.

  The widespread assumption that nothing was as it seemed gathered strength in the 1990s when Frenay’s allegation that Moulin was ‘the Communist Party’s man’, first made in a letter published by Passy in 1950 and then again in a book by Frenay that appeared in 1977, resurfaced in a series of books that suggested the founder of the CNR had been a Soviet agent.894 Moulin’s new-found status as the sole known representative of the Resistance made him an even more attractive target for writers and for a public that seemed to have an endless appetite for books and magazine articles that claimed to have discovered new ‘revelations’ about the past, even when the evidence was tenuous or even non-existent. This corrosive tendency was given further impetus when, shortly before leaving office, President François Mi
tterrand revealed quite how close he had been to Pétain and the Vichy regime before he went over to the Resistance, showing the ambiguity of his own personal story and inadvertently highlighting the courage and clarity of those résistants who did not make the same mistakes.895

  The fashion for debunking myths reached its height in 1997 when Raymond Aubrac was accused of working for Klaus Barbie, with the knowledge of his wife, Lucie – probably the most widely known living résistant. The Aubracs successfully sued the author of these allegations, but in an attempt to definitively clear their names, they organized a ‘round-table discussion’ with leading historians, which was published in the daily newspaper Libération.896 The result was not what they had hoped for: the confrontation turned into a police-style interrogation and left the reader extremely uneasy – although the group of historians rejected the allegations, they were not satisfied by the Aubracs’ inability to explain all the detail of events forty-five years earlier, nor did the academics understand why the Aubracs’ stories had not been precisely identical every time they told them in the intervening decades.897 What became known as ‘the Aubrac affair’ has in turn been studied in terms of what it revealed about French society, the idea of a ‘court of history’ and the malleability of memories.898

  The ‘case’ against the Aubracs was largely based on the alleged testimony of Barbie, who in 1983 had finally been arrested in Bolivia, where he had been working for the CIA, and brought back to France for trial. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 and died in prison four years later. The Barbie trial, which was filmed in its totality and is regularly used as an educational tool in French schools, was the most dramatic of a series of prosecutions that were seen as a way of finally exorcizing the ghosts of collaboration. In 1998, fourteen years after he had been convicted in the pages of Didier Daeninckx’s novel, Maurice Papon was finally found guilty of overseeing the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux. (He was never tried for his role in the 1961 massacre of Algerians in Paris.) Four years earlier, René Bousquet was accused of involvement in the round-up of Jews in Paris and Marseilles (he was murdered by a mentally ill man before his trial began), while in 1994 Paul Touvier, a notorious leader of the Milice who worked with Barbie and had been amnestied by President Pompidou in 1972, was finally convicted for his crimes against the Resistance.899