All nations have some part of their history which is so controversial, divisive and painful that it can sometimes seem better for all concerned to hide from it rather than face it, at least until enough time has passed. For the French, the period of German occupation during the Second World War undoubtedly counts as such a topic. For many years it was deemed too difficult to present except in a sanitised and comforting narrative according to which the French people had all, in their various ways, contributed to a heroic resistance to the Germans, whether gaily blowing up bridges and sabotaging trains or merely giving German soldiers misleading directions. According to this quasi-official version of events, Marshal Pétain, Head of State under the government established at Vichy, was a tragic figure, caught in a situation he could hardly understand and surrounded by villainous characters such as his Prime Minister Pierre Laval, who co-operated happily with the German authorities, and the black-booted thugs of the collaborationist malice; otherwise the French settled down grimly to the years of shortages, arrests and the black market, waiting for the day of liberation, which would see them pour onto the streets to greet the allies troops with songs, pretty girls and wine.
That was pretty much the eversion of events to be found in conversations, school textbooks and in films until 1969, when Marcel Ophüls’s film The Sorrow and the Pity did not come out: not for another ten years was it considered safe to allow his heavily uncomfortable revisionist view to reach French cinema screens. Interviewing a wide range of figures, French, German and British, Ophüls challenged the post-war consensus by highlighting the sheer extent of collaboration that had happened, some of it personal petty vindictiveness against neighbours but some of it reflecting more overt and active sympathy with the Nazis aims and methods. Louis Malle’s 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien similarly highlighted collaboration in small-town France, this time by a young man who joined the German police simply as a more interesting way of spending his days than washing the floors in a hospital. The role of the French police, which had been presented in patriotic-heroic mode in René Clément’s 1966 film Is Paris Burning?, came increasingly into question as details began to emerge of its role in enforcing, and even exceeding, the Nazi’s anti-Jewish laws, even rounding up French-born Jews for transportation to Auschwitz.
By the 1980s, therefore, a new consensus was beginning to take hold, whereby the French had largely been enthusiastic collaborationists with only a brave and unrepresentative minority undertaking resistance work. However, this version has similarly come under criticism in the most recent historiography, which stresses the difference between collaboration, which all French people had to follow to one extent or another, and active collaborationism, of the sort pursued by the pro-Nazi malice and others. They have also brought out the implications of the deep conflict between the Resistance groups linked to De Gaulle’s Free French forces based in London and the Communist Resistance groups who owed their allegiance to Stalin. This is passed over as a little local difficulty, easily overcome in the interests of patriotic unity in Is Paris Burning? But in reality the rivalry between the different sides of the Resistance was a deadly power struggle, hardly less bitter than the fight against the Germans. De Gaulle was determined to manoeuvre himself into a position whereby he could take control in liberated France as a legitimate Head of State; not only were the Allies far from sure that they wanted to accept this, but the Communists were equally determined to prevent it. The days of liberation in 1944, therefore, were far less clear-cut than they are usually understood in other countries, where D-Day and the events which followed are usually understood as a straightforward process of liberation from a foreign oppressor. For those who had stood by Vichy as the only legitimate and absolutely necessary government of national unity, 1944 was a day of reckoning; for the rival groups vying for control in independent France it was the signal for what looked very like the start of civil war.
Clearly there were deep forces and feelings at work in wartime France and they are not all to be explained merely in terms of an adjustment to military defeat in 1940. The origins of France’s wartime agony can be traced much further back, at least to Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Berlin in 1806, through the humiliation of the war with Bismarck in 1870 and the traumatic crushing of the Paris Commune. This course will look at the longer context for the Occupation and at the long shadow it still casts.
