1. Past and Present

'Toute histoire est histoire contemporaine', suggested the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. In his study of French accounts of the Occupation period, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours, Henry Rousso looks at how, in the fifty or so years since the 'années noires', France's way of talking about its dark past has changed. He suggests that each three distinct periods can be identified: 1945-1968, 1968-1980, 1980-2000. Each of these periods have looked at the Occupation so differently that they say more about their own period than they do about the Second World War in question. This lecture will explore, through French film, the way France has reflected on the events of the Occupation, to see to what extent they have been distorted by the moment in which they appear. In doing so, I wish to make it clear that, as recent research has shown in Jersey and Guernsey, and with respect to the awful record of the British Government in helping Jews fleeing the Holocaust, that collaboration with Fascism could easily have been part of British history. Indeed, with the return of Fascism today, I want to illustrate the relevance of the comment in George Orwell's 1984 that 'He who controls the past controls the future'.

2. Myth and Reality: 1944-1968

'Le cinéma', declared the French film-maker René Clément, 'est un moyen documentaire, un moyen de culture tellement important que l'on n'a pas le droit de mentir'. As director of the classic film of French resistance, La Bataille du rail (1946), Clément wanted to testify to the bravery of French railway-workers in combating the Fascist stranglehold over France. Using a documentary style, and influenced by Eisenstein's theories of montage, Clément's film combined anonymous heroism, and the defiant anti-fascism of the French working-class, with a documentary-like focus on the mechanics of train sabotage (see stills below).

French railway-workers on a sabotage mission.

The film's documentary-style approach to the sabotage is meticulous.

A concerted effort by all railway-workers, against the Nazis' armoured train:

Victory ! and Liberation !

(stills from R. Clément & C. Audry, La Bataille du rail, Editions de Crémille, 1972)

The film shows why the French Communist Party (PCF) was nick-named 'le parti des fusillés'. Here we see the railway workers being shot by the Nazis for sabotage in a highly moving sequence:

Not surprisingly the film's release was met with critical acclaim: 'le visage même de l'héroïsme', according to Georges Sadoul; 'c'est la mise en place de la légende de la résistance', wrote Lagny. Indeed, there is no clearer picture of how French workers sacrificed themselves to help liberate France.

But there were a number of problems with the film's portrayal. Firstly, as Martin O'Shaughnessy has pointed out ('Unconventional Form, Conventional Image' in Kedward/Wood, The Liberation of France. Image and Event, Berg 1995), the film's only reference to anti-semitism - a sign written in German - tended to exonerate the French authorities from participation in atrocities. There was no mention at all of collaboration. Though the film was clearly Communist in orientation - the hammer and sickle drawn on the train in the final shot of the film leaves us in no doubt about Clément's political sympathies -, the message was a distinctly Gaullist one. There should be no surprise in this political alliance between Communist leaders and Gaullism in the aftermath of the Liberation. The Communist Party leadership - under Maurice Thorez, who had spent much of the War in Moscow - played the perfect role in dampening down deep popular anger in the years following the War, following to the letter Stalin's 'Third Period' policy of collaboration (I choose the word carefully) between Communist Parties and 'progressive' elements of the Capitalist class. It is difficult not to see La Bataille du Rail in this context.

Indeed, using the PCF's political strategy, de Gaulle was able to overplay the military significance of France's role in the Liberation. His famous speech on the Champs Elysées about how Paris (by extension, France) had liberated itself was to become the hallmark of Gaullist control of what Rousso calls 'le mythe résistancialiste'. This did not simply refer to exaggerating the extent of resistance, but, by definition, to a suppression of information about collaboration. And though de Gaulle took a back seat in the troubled years of the Fourth Republic (1946-1958), his ownership of this double-edged myth allowed him to triumph back to power in 1958 at the height of another military crisis, the Algerian War.

We can discuss the rights and wrongs of an over-emphasis on resistance activities; some commentators have suggested, citing Chateaubriand's famous dictum 'On gouverne les hommes avec des songes', that France needed these myths to re-unite and rebuild the country and its morale. Indeed, according to military historian John Keegan, 'The French are entitled to exaggerate the resistance'. But what is more shocking is de Gaulle's own views of Pétain and the Vichy Government's collaboration with Hitler. Rousso shows clearly the ambivalence and opportunism in de Gaulle's attitude to resistance and collaboration. A reported comment by de Gaulle in 1946 was that France had needed both de Gaulle (urging resistance) and Pétain (doing deals with Hitler): France in the depths of its crisis, said de Gaulle, needed these 'deux cordes à son arc' (Rousso, pp. 48-55). Hardly the views of a committed opponent of fascism and Vichy collaboration.

Indeed, this set the tone for the manner in which the French State systematically manipulated history and justice in the two decades following the Second World War. By and large the French national psyche (not to mention interested parties) wanted to put the 'années noires' behind them. Hence Rousso's strongly Freudian/psychoanalytical word: 'Refoulements'. Such a repression of the nastier aspects of the Occupation found its expression in French cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Claude Autant-Lara's blockbuster La Traversée de Paris (1956) about the black-market, treated profiteering, casting cinema-star Jean Gabin as the hero of the operation, in the most light-hearted way. Even the critical reference to the French barman hiding a Jewish girl from the Nazis only to exploit her situation by not paying her for her work did not undermine the overall message of the 'great French spirit' (incarnated by Gabin).

Nor did the cinema industry escape censorship on the matter of French collaboration. Alain Resnais's stunning documentary on the Concentration camps, Nuit et brouillard (1956), which became the subject of a polemic, in which the West German embassy in France insisted upon it being removed form the Cannes Film Festival selection, and which was also censored to hide the 'képi' of a French policeman looking out over the Pithiviers camp.

Photograph taken at Pithiviers on April 17, 1941. Pithiviers was one of two
main concentration camps for foreign-born Jews arrested in France.

The same photograph, in the doctored version the censors could approve, as it
appears in shot no. 39 in Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard.

(from R. Raskin, 'Nuit et Brouillard' by Alain Resnais, Aarhus UP 1987)

3. The "Miroir brisé": 1968-1975

It is perhaps difficult to overstate the importance of May 68 in French society. Of course, its full significance still remains to be confirmed by future events. But one thing is certain: the way French people talked and thought about the 'années noires' after 1968 would never be the same again. It was not simply that students and workers ignited the (then) biggest general strike in history (up to 10 million taking collective action), causing de Gaulle to leave the country hurriedly, ostensibly to muster the French Army stationed in Germany. The fact that it was de Gaulle and his autocratic regime that ordered the vicious police repression, that the mass of French insurgents were challenging the same General de Gaulle who had apparently helped to save France two decades before, was bound to have a crippling effect on the Gaullist 'résistancialiste' myth. It cannot be any surprise that challenging de Gaulle's running of France in 1968 was bound to change the whole way people talked about the Occupation. This comes across most dramatically in the documentary film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (Marcel Ophuls, 1971). Not only did the film interview collaborationists, French Fascists (as well as resisters and Communists), and show a French (rather than exclusively German) antisemitism, the figure of de Gaulle, usually present in films about the period, was conspicuous by his absence.

French Nazi Christian de la Mazière (right) talking to interviewer André Harris in 1969 (from M. Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity, Paladin 1975)

Not surprisingly, the film caused a scandal, one so large that it was not shown on French television until 1981, ten years after its release. Made in 1967 and 1968, from 26 hours of film, reduced to a mere 4 hours, the film was, in cinematic terms, a fascinating use of 'vox pop', carefully edited and sequenced for maximum effect. For Rousso, it was the first cinematic event in the smashing of the distorting mirror that the French psyche had held up to itself (at least that constituted by politicians, film-makers, historians etc.). But it could only have been made, and caused such a polemic, in the context of a radically changed post-68 France.

An unknown half-Jewish writer was to set the tone for the next ten years of portrayals of the Occupation period. Patrick Modiano had published in 1968 his complex novel of Jewish experience in the War, the playfully titled La Place de l'Etoile, a pun on the famous square in Paris and the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear. His next novel, La Ronde de nuit, published in 1969, the narratively-challenging account of a character switching sides with impunity between collaborationist and resistance groups, was to set the tone for next few years.

The post-68 period, running till 1975, has been characterised as one of a profound social, political and ideological malaise in France. Though the événements inspired a libertarian desire for social and political challenges to Western Capitalism, the feeling in France was simultaneously that the May 68 explosion had been defeated, if not 'recuperated', by the System: Capitalism, though damaged ideologically by the strikes and occupations, was still firmly in the economic and political saddle. It is not surprising that a political demobilisation began to set in during the early 1970s. It is precisely in this context that Louis Malle's brilliant story of a young peasant boy collaborating with the French Milice and the Nazis was made.

It was also not surprising that Louis Malle, by now a renowned filmmaker, chose Patrick Modiano to write the script for the film. Like Modiano's novel La Ronde de nuit, Malle's Lacombe, Lucien challenged the simplistic opposition between resistance and collaboration. The main character, Lucien Lacombe, is refused entry into the resistance, and then, by chance - his bike has a puncture outside the collaborationist Milice headquarters - he joins the collaborators, carrying out his cruel duties with measured gusto. Yet his allegiances are highly confused:

Lucien with the Jewish tailor Horn and his daughter France.

Even Pétain's image is irreverently treated by the Milice:

(from Malle on Malle, ed. P French, Faber & Faber 1993)

The most powerful sequence comes towards the end of the film when Lucien seems set to torture a résistant. But what is crucial to the film is that Lucien seems totally devoid of ideological or political motivation. Whilst being a member of a viciously antisemitic Milice group, he is also in love with a Jewish girl, in hiding with her father, and with whom he escapes to save her. Though cruel, Lucien is portrayed by Malle and Modiano as a victim of his own modest (i.e., poor, rural and uneducated) upbringing. Malle's Lacombe, Lucien seems to be saying that the deeply political choice between collaboration and resistance was a myth; chance and personal ignorance played as a crucial role (see Paul Jankowski, 'In Defense of Fiction: Resistance, Collaboration, and Lacombe Lucien', in Journal of Modern History 63, September 1991). Clearly, this was not just a (further) revelation of France's darker past, but could be seen also as questioning of resistance motives.

The film (and Modiano's writing at this time) was a classic example of what has been called 'la Mode rétro' (see Alan Morris two books, Collaboration and Resistance reviewed. Writers and the 'mode retro' in post-Gaullist France, Berg, 1992, and Patrick Modiano, Berg, 1996). The 'Mode rétro' was a way of looking at the past - especially the Occupation - for a generation which had not lived through the War (in Modiano's case, this is very relevant, having been born in 1945). What did the War mean to the children of those who had lived through it, who had heard precious little but platitudes about resistance, and who, now, old enough to be key players in the challenge to de Gaulle in May 68 and to de Gaulle's Occupation myth, but who now saw a new malaise in French society? 'Mode rétro' was also, as Henry Rousso insists, the opportunity for Jewish memory to discover its hidden history. Joseph Joffo's Un Sac de billes - the story of two Jewish boys escaping Paris for the free South - was a good example, made into a film by Jacques Doillon in 1975.

The 'Mode rétro' also led to a spate of historical studies of Vichy, collaboration and 'La France allemande'. But, not only did this expression refer to how the French thought about the Occupation years in the new post-1968 France, it contained within it a highly decadent, libertarian aspect to it. Ever sensitive to the minutiae of the French film industry, Rousso notices how soft-core erotic films in France - ever more present in the France of the post-1960s sexual revolution - were by the mid-nineteen seventies tending to link sex and erotica to fascist 'chic'. Not so much a support of fascism, but a consideration of the deeply oppressive nature of human desire, this mixing of sex with nazi memorabilia had its equivalent with the elements of the Punk movement in Britain (Sid Vicious walking down King's Road wearing a swastika arm-band, for example). The aim was to shock, and to question human drives, as well as to regret the return to comfortable Western Capitalist democracy. For some, the 1960s did not end until 1975.

4. Collaboration and Resistance, 1980-2000

The final stage in our brief survey of how France has portrayed - via the cinema - its darker past to itself, is a complex one. The 1980s saw a spate of films that dealt with the Jewish experience of the 'années noires': Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), Au revoir les enfants (Louis Malle, 1987), Hotel Terminus (Marcel Ophuls, 1988). These were made against the backdrop of some high-profile trials: Klaus Barbie in 1987, and then the Touvier case in 1992. François Truffaut's Le Dernier métro (1980) tried to redress the 'France antisémite' view by showing how a theatre was involved in helping Jews.
If Claude Berri's Uranus (1990) reflected the collapse of the Communist Bloc in 1989 by showing the PCF as unprincipled as the rest in the Occupation period, Claude Chabrol's brilliant montage of war-time pro-Vichy propaganda, L'Oeil de Vichy (1992), trusted the responsibility of the viewer to pick up the anti-fascist message.

The most fascinating recent film on the Occupation is undoubtedly Jacques Audiard's Un Héros très discret (1996). The story of a French man, Albert Dehousse, who completely fictionalises his role in the Resistance, managing to become a resistance hero by telling an entirely fabricated web of lies about his activities during the War, is not simply a reflection of the unearthed past of France's previous president François Mitterrand. The film seems to be making a mockery of the Resistance fighters who believe and accept (and, at certain points, unwittingly corroborate) his heroic fantasies.

The film is also a brilliant critique of memory and remembering. However, in my view, far from representing a direct attack on the Resistance and its attendant myths, Audiard's Un Héros très discret represents a break with recent French cinema; firstly by returning resistance activity to the spotlight of film, and then by concentrating on the skill and heroism involved in resisting the Nazi occupation. The Maquis and the resistance were so impressively secretive (they had no choice), that it is not surprising that a Dehousse could come along and make up his stories of resistance heroism. Thus, the film could be seen to be praising the bravery and skill of the Resistance, whilst criticising the manner in which the Resisters have since been recuperated into an institutionalised and patriotic servicemen's club, sanctioned and used by the very same politicians who would have been happy to (and in Mitterrand's case, did) work with the Nazis.

5. Conclusion: History Today

One thing is certain, as the debates around Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, 1997), even the duplicity of Jean Moulin, and the Papon trial, all show, the History of the Occupation of France remains firmly part of French culture, even over fifty years after the event. Rousso's analysis makes this point very clearly: there is a kind of fault-line running through French public life that constantly returns to haunt it. However, there are a number of dangers with Rousso's analysis. His 'Syndrome' metaphor implies that all French people are implicated, that it is a 'French' illness. The French anti-fascist tradition suggests otherwise.

But also Rousso's method implies that the representation of History is as important as the History itself. Ironically, this joins the 'post-modernist' belief that History is only representation, History merely story, the very belief that opens the door to the frightening 'Holocaust-denial' currently taking place. Rousso's refusal to testify at the trial of Maurice Papon in 1998 - a historian has no place in a court of law, he claimed - is perhaps a sign of this depoliticisation.

As I write this lecture, we have a fascist party in a European government for the first time since 1945. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret, leaders of sizeable fascist outfits, are the immediate beneficiaries of Jorg Haïder's success in Austria. As a recent book on French fascism shows (Pete Fysh & Jim Wolfreys, The Politics of Racism in France, Macmillan, 1998), fascism is a real threat in Europe today, and tries to hide its fascism by twisting the past. Rather than Croce's belief that 'Toute histoire est histoire contemporaine', we should perhaps turn to a greater philosopher of history (quoted at the end of Lacombe, Lucien), Karl Marx: 'Those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them.'

Websites

www.yahoo.fr/Sciences_humaines/Histoire/Par_periodes/XXe_siecle/Seconde_Guerre_mondiale/
www.yahoo.fr/Sciences_humaines/Histoire/Par_periodes/XXe_siecle/Holocauste__L__/
www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/occupied/collab.htm

Rene Clément, La Bataille du rail (1945)
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=3238
http://www.morbihan-valdoust.com/Sitemalestroit/bataille.htm
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/9709/cannes/bataille_du_rail.html
http://www.mosquitoweb.fr/culture/france/cinema/fictions/100films/fr/016.html
http://chomsky.arts.adelaide.edu.au/person/DHart/Films/BattleOfRails.html

Claude Autant-Lara, La Traversée de Paris (1956)
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=2570
http://cinema.le-village.com/busterkeat/Pages/250/0233.htm
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,seq-2033-41441-QUO,00.htm
http://www.ecran-noir.com/films/56/traversee.htm
http://mx2.xoom.com/mcbxl/france/traverseedeparis.htm

Robert Bresson, Un condamné à mort s'est echappé (1956)
http://www.ecran-noir.com/real/france/bresson.htm
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=3240
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Metro/9384/films/man_escaped/index.htm
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,2320,dos-2475-35583-QUO-1,00.htm
http://www.musexpo.com/apart/monde/articles/1223bresson.html

Jean-Pierre Melville, L'Armée des ombres (1969)
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=9
http://www.ihtp-cnrs.ens-cachan.fr/shist_cine.html
http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/culture/france/cinema/fictions/seize/armee.html

Marcel Ophuls, Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1969)
http://www.info.unicaen.fr/herve/mae/cinema/realisateurs/78.html
http://www.sudouest.com/papon/retro/971027/article/1027140307.htm
http://www.ina.fr/INA/Archives/Guerre/preface.fr.html
http://www.nouvelobs.com/Cinema/Dossier/Shoah.html
http://perso.club-internet.fr/erra/Etude-doc-2GM.html

Louis Malle, Lacombe Lucien (1974)
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/Opera/2464/franz/lacomb.htm
http://www.france3.fr/fr3/ecrivain/modiano.html

Joseph Losey, Monsieur Klein (1979)
http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/culture/france/cinema/fictions/seize/etrangers.htm
http://perso.club-internet.fr/erra/Gildas-Cochenec/SHOAH.html
http://www.mcinema.com/dossiers/films/56.html
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=7475

Francois Truffaut, Le Dernier Métro (1980)
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=8269
http://iihm.imag.fr/truffaut/
http://www.sdm.qc.ca/mediafilm/fil025.html

Louis Malle, Au revoir les enfants (1987)
http://www.ecran-noir.com/films/87/aurevoir.htm
http://www.mcinema.com/film/?id=2578
http://members.tripod.de/juda
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/SchneiderF/