I. History
In May 1940, after eight months of the drôle de guerre, Guderian's tanks crossed the Ardennes and the Meuse, and within four weeks the French armies had been defeated. In the débâcle, over eight million women, children, and old men were caught up in a nightmare exode towards the centre of France. There was no saving Battle of the Marne, no citizens' Valmy. Paris was declared an open city, and from Bordeaux Marshal Pétain, aged 84, called for a cease-fire. In a sacrificial gesture he offered himself to France. It began a mythology of Pétain as the saviour of France, a conjuncture of the public's desperate need for reassurance and Pétain's own charismatic paternalism. The Armistice divided France into two major zones. In the zone libre at Vichy, Pétain was invested with full powers by the National Assembly, and created a new État Français, proclaiming the virtues of Travail, Famille, and Patrie. The regime launched a National Revolution based on the doctrinaire ideals of the nationalist Right, excluding Jews from civil rights, mobilizing youth, and abolishing trade unions. Vichy ruled across both zones, though subject to the German military authorities in the zone occupée, and the regime continued even after the Germans had occupied the whole country on 11 November 1942.
In Paris, French fascists and intellectual admirers of Nazism competed for German patronage and a dynamic role in the Nazi New Europe. Some 3, 000 fought in German uniform on the Russian Front in the Légion des Volontaires Français (LVF), recruited by Jacques Doriot, and in the south Joseph Darnand's Milice pursued Jews and Resisters with methods similar to the Gestapo. Pétain announced a policy of collaboration after his meeting and symbolic handshake with Hitler in October 1940, but what started essentially as coexistence became steadily more servile. Admiral Darlan almost took France to war on Germany's side over Syria, and in 1942-3 Pierre Laval justified the inhuman deportation of Jewish families from the Vichy zone as part of a shield policy to protect France from a possible Gauleiter. Vichy also collaborated, though more ambivalently, in the transfer of over 600, 000 French workers to Germany under the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), and in 1944 the more extreme collaborators, Darnand, Déat, and the influential broadcaster Philippe Henriot, were brought into the government. The last year of Vichy was fascist by any criterion.
From autumn 1941 Vichy was progressively rejected by the majority of the population. Pétainism survived longer. Resistance began with individual acts of defiance and freedom, notably General de Gaulle's appel of 18 June 1940 from London, and grew into specialist escape and intelligence networks co-operating with the Free French or the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), and into multi-operational movements with their own clandestine press: Combat, Libération, Défense de la France, Franc-Tireur, Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien, among many other titles, which marked the resilience of hundreds of small, disconnected groups in the first two years. The Communist-led movement Front National, with its activist groups Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) and party newspaper L'Humanité, was brought into closer rapport with the other movements by Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's special envoy, whose last achievement before his arrest, torture, and death was the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR). The radical reforming Charter of the CNR indicated just how far the Resistance had become an alternative France, with its own publications, social services, urban groupes francs, and finally the maquis, formed in the hills and forests in 1943 and bringing together resisters on the run, anti-fascists from Spain and Central Europe, and réfractaires refusing STO. The maquis suffered tragic but heroic defeats in the mountains of Glières and Vercors, and elsewhere engaged in largely autonomous tactics of ambush and sabotage, backed by widespread community involvement throughout the countryside. The Germans, and the Milice, exacted ferocious reprisals on these communities, reaching the depths of horror with the shooting and burning of over 600 villagers at Oradour-sur-Glâne. It was June 1944, and the Germans were in full retreat. Between June and September they were driven out of France by the combined armies of the British, Americans, and Free French, and the actions of the Resistance coordinated in the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI). The euphoria of the Liberation brought universal festivities and an extensive purge (épuration) of collaborators, and Vichy ministers were eventually brought back from Sigmaringen in Germany to stand trial. Due to the Free French and the internal Resistance, France emerged from the war acknowledged as one of the victorious powers.
2. Renewal and Conflict
In 1940 the first aspirations for revival seemed to share a similar vocabulary. Denis Saurat's Regeneration (1940) and Jean Schlumberger's writings, both adopted by the Free French, called for cultural renewal in terms comparable to those employed at Vichy and by celebrants of the New Order, Drieu la Rochelle, Rebatet, and Jacques Chardonne. Montherlant's Solstice de Juin (1940), Mounier's republication of Esprit, Claudel's ode to Pétain, and the article ‘Retour à Molière’ (1941) by Ramon Fernandez were all statements of cultural reassertion and potential, despite, or even because of, the defeat. But the right to speak for France and for French literature was bitterly disputed. Péguy's writings of patriotic defiance were appropriated both by nationalists at Vichy and by the first dissidents such as Edmond Michelet. Four years later Péguy's Jeanne d'Arc was mobilized for the maquis, with Jeanne's boast ‘je serais chef de bande’. The historical Jeanne was fêted first by Vichy, but increasingly by the Resistance. The myths of antiquity were diversely retold. Meanings became stipulative or covert. The authority of the word was fractured.
3. Collaborationism
Within the immediate German orbit, Phönix oder Asche? (Phoenix or Ashes?) was the title chosen by Bernhard Payr, head of the Nazi Literature Office, for his survey of the French literary scene in 1940-1. It was the prescriptive side of the ‘Listes Otto’ by which the Propaganda Abteilung banned 2, 000 titles and 850 authors and translators, mostly for Jewish origins or left-wing affiliations. All the Paris publishers submitted. Payr found the language of Céline and Rebatet crude and eccentric, but their ideas commendable. Céline's visceral antisemitism was displayed in Les Beaux Draps (1941), and Rebatet's misanthropic nihilism indulged the taste for cultural masochism prevalent among the collaborationists: Les Décombres (1942) was the literary success of this viciously talented world. Drieu took over La Nouvelle Revue Française from Paulhan, and made it into a fulcrum of the New Europe, visiting Weimar in 1941 with Brasillach, Fernandez, Bonnard, Chardonne, and Jouhandeau. The German exhibition ‘Le Juif et la France’ was reviewed in Jean Luchaire's Les Nouveaux Temps as ‘un juste racisme’, and the ‘unmasking’ of Jews in the theatre was personally undertaken by the envenomed critic Alain Laubreaux (alias Max Daxiat) in his column in Le Cri du peuple and Je suis partout.
4. Vichy
The approved press and literature of Vichy reflected less the German present than the glories of the French past, for which Maurras developed his ‘Uchronie’, an ideal chronology to link Pétain with the ancien régime in a seamless continuum. His colleague Léon Daudet was less dismissive of the recent past, and in an article on ‘La Littérature de demain’ (1940) gave Péguy, Claudel, Proust, Saint-Exupéry, and even Gide as models. Early Vichy stressed the independence of the French literary tradition, but growing collaboration and the didactic role of Pétainism brought censorship and prescription, closing Esprit and dissolving the intellectual École des Cadres at Uriage. Books were to have a nobility of moral purpose, and to celebrate familial and rural values. Maurras, Henri Massis, and René Benjamin were Vichy's chroniclers and conscience, Henri Pourrat and Jean de la Varende its literary eminence, and Paul Morand its public image as writer and diplomat. Pourrat's Vent de Mars, set in the countryside of the Auvergne, received the Prix Goncourt for 1941, bestowed with ceremony at Chamalières, in the heart of the region, and Giono's Regain was recuperated by the regime. Outdoor life and sport became themes of revivalist fervour, and Obey's drama spectacle 800 mètres (1941), with music by Honegger, epitomized the ‘joie de l'effort’, according to Jean-Louis Barrault, one of the main animators of the first performance at the Stade Roland Garros. The label ‘Vichy’ cannot be used indiscriminately to indicate all legalized publications and public performances in this period. Were it to be so, it would be attached to Aragon's Le Crève-cœur (1941), Claude Vermorel's Jeanne avec nous (first performed 1942), Sartre's Les Mouches (1943), all of which are held to have sustained ideas of resistance, and to Valéry's Mauvaises pensées et autres (1942), which sought to establish the inviolability of French literature.
5. Publication and Ambiguity
Nevertheless, for certain writers any legalized publication of whatever kind did amount to compromise, not just with Vichy but with the Germans. It was argued that behind the censors lay the authority which executed the savants of the Musée de l'Homme in February 1942 and which perpetrated the savagery of the round-up of Jewish families at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in July 1942. The fact of publication was conditioned by these events: the only unequivocal defiance was to publish clandestinely as an act of resistance. Even silence could be misunderstood.
It is now more readily argued that ambiguity typifies much of the published work of the period, and there is a reluctance to assign all works to specific categories of thought and belief. Giono's writings, which appeared in La Gerbe and the NRF, Anouilh's Antigone (1944), and Saint-Exupéry's Pilote de guerre (1942) all contain different kinds of ambiguity. The literary reviews Confluences, run by René Tavernier, and Fontaine, directed by Max-Pol Fouchet in Algiers, were adept at defying the censor, and Seghers published Poésie as an annual anthology, repeatedly successful in its evocation of dissidence. A greater pluralism in cultural practices under Vichy is now regularly affirmed.
6. Resistance
Publishing an underground newspaper was the most widespread collective act at the origins of Resistance. Words were action. It was the decision of Jacques Decour and Georges Politzer to bring out a review, La Pensée libre (No. 1, February 1941), which inspired the first clandestine product of the Éditions de Minuit—a run of 350 copies of Le Silence de la mer by Vercors (Jean Bruller), originally intended for La Pensée libre. Decour's review was broken up by the Germans, and he himself arrested in January 1942 as he was preparing the first number of a larger project, Les Lettres françaises, finally launched in the following September.
The originators of Éditions de Minuit were Pierre de Lescure and Jacques Debû-Bridel, while the link between many literary resisters was made by Jean Paulhan. At Minuit artisans and writers worked together as a collective; clandestine literature was process and not just product. For all its realism, Vercors's novel was more fable than document, one of the ways in which Resistance writers established a creative tension with the cause for which they were fighting. In the same way, Triolet created in the Juliette of Les Amants d'Avignon (1943) an archetypal heroine, even if in fact many of the women who acted as liaison agents were not so very unlike her. The women facing torture and deportation in Claude Aveline's intimate novel Le Temps mort (1944) lead lives which are both private and public, so that their struggles and the horrors they endure are seen in both personal and historic terms.
This fusion of private and public was taken to its highest literary level in poetry, which was as integral to the Resistance as counter-information and codes. Concise, using little ink or paper and easily memorized, much of the poetry of Aragon and Eluard was functional in the same way as Kessel and Marly's ‘Chant des partisans’, first printed in Cahiers de Libération in September 1943. Eluard's ‘Liberté’ was dropped in thousands from the air. But many poems went far further, consciously re-creating for the reader meanings that had been lost, recovering identity, giving new life: ‘Il y a des mots qui font vivre | Et ce sont les mots innocents…’ (Eluard, ‘Gabriel Péri’, 1944). This was the importance of Jean Cassou's 33 Sonnets composés au secret (1944) and of the anthology L'Honneur des poètes (1943), in which Eluard's carefully weighted poem ‘Les Belles Balances de l'ennemi’ first appeared, turning the German dominance round in the last line: ‘Nous ferons justice du mal.’ Emotive and active, Resistance poetry also re-mobilized history, legend, and locality—Paris above all, but the countryside too—breaking Vichy's monopoly of regionalism and fashioning a post-war generation of Occitan poets.
7. Liberation and After
The significance of words under the Occupation and the fierce struggle for cultural legitimacy gave the purge of writers a central place in the retributive justice of the Liberation. Resistance intellectuals divided over the ethics and politics of the trials, Camus, Debû-Bridel, and Claude Morgan arguing for the necessity of a purge, and Mauriac and Paulhan warning against the use of scapegoats. Camus adjusted his position and signed the appeal for Brasillach, along with 58 others, and in August 1945 announced in Combat that the purges had failed and were now ‘odious’.
The épuration at popular level was one of the elements which provoked a post-war genre of ambiguous and ironic writing about the Occupation, led by the semi-documentary Mon village à l'heure allemande (1945) by Jean-Louis Bory and Les Forêts de la nuit (1947) by Jean-Louis Curtis. It reached its satirical heights with Aymé's Uranus (1948) and Jean Dutourd's burlesque Au bon beurre (1952), and a point of bleak pessimism in Nimier's Les Épées (1948). In contrast, Chamson's Le Puits des miracles (1945) was a perpetuation of Resistance, and Beauvoir's Le Sang des autres (1945) was received as a Resistance novel, despite her protestations. Six years later Vailland's Un jeune homme seul (1951) marked the path of self-fulfilment through Resistance that the fourth volume of Sartre's Chemins de la liberté might well have taken. The allegory of Camus's La Peste (1947) is for some debased, and for others heightened, by its symmetry with the Occupation, a literary debate which has its parallel among historians with the disagreements over the representative quality of the epic film documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971) made by Marcel Ophuls. Equally contentious was the portrait of a peasant youth turned collaborator in Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano's film Lacombe Lucien (1974).
The prevalence of myths, judgements, and deconstructions of the period in all branches of history, literature, and film during the 1970s and 1980s led Henry Rousso to discern a permanent syndrome de Vichy. Among specific treatments, the verve of local resistance has been captured by Jean-Pierre Chabrol, the Cévenol novelist, in Un homme de trop (1958), and the experience of Jewish children has been evoked with humour and vitality in Joseph Joffo's Un sac de billes (1973), and with haunting poignancy by Louis Malle in Au revoir les enfants (1987), a film no less conclusive on the barbarity of the Holocaust than Resnais's classic Nuit et brouillard (1956). Antisemitism is also at the heart of Truffaut's film Le Dernier Métro (1980), one of the most convincing presentations of the personal ambiguities as well as the stark divisions of les années noires.
[Roderick Kedward]
Bibliography
- P. Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes (1974)
- R. Kedward and R. Austin (eds.), Vichy France and the Resistance (1985)
- I. Higgins (ed.), The Second World War in Literature (1986)
- H. Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy (1987)
- J.-P. Rioux (ed.), Politiques et pratiques culturelles dans la France de Vichy (1988)
- M. Atack, Literature and the Resistance (1989)
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
