All nations have some part of their history which is so controversial and painful that it can sometimes seem better to hide from it until enough time has passed for it be talked about. For the French, the Occupation is undoubtedly such a topic. For many years the accepted version was that the French they had maintained a heroic resistance to the Germans, blowing up bridges and sabotaging trains with gay abandon. Marshal Pétain was a tragic figure, trapped in an impossible situation; the true collaborators were villainous characters like Prime Minister Pierre Laval and the black-booted thugs of the collaborationist malice.
This comforting version was challenged in 1969 with the release of Marcel Ophüls’s film The Sorrow and the Pity - though it would take another ten years before it was considered safe to show it in French cinemas. Ophüls highlighted the extent of French collaboration, some of it personal and petty vindictiveness between neighbours, some of it more overtly pro-Nazi, not in cosmopolitan Paris but deep in the French countryside. Louis Malle’s 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien similarly highlighted collaboration in small-town France. The French police, the patriotic heroes of René Clément’s 1966 Is Paris Burning?, found their record questioned as details emerged of their enthusiasm for rounding up French Jews and sending them to Auschwitz.
By the 1990s, therefore, a completely different consensus was merging, the French had largely collaborated, collaborationists with only a small brave unrepresentative minority in the Resistance. This revisionist version is now criticised by historians who stress the difference between everyday collaboration and active pro-Nazi collaborationism. Historians have highlighted the deep conflict between the Gaullist and Communist Resistance groups: far from being the little local difficulty shown in Is Paris Burning?, the rivalry was a deadly power struggle for control of liberated France. When the Liberation came in 1944, therefore, it was a day of reckoning - not only were collaborators to be punished but it signalled the start of what looked very like civil war.
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