Abstract
In the first instance, it is important to clarify more fully the facts, concepts and judgements which determine the context of this study and our understanding of the occupation and its consequences. There is no intention of providing a broad factual survey of the sort already to be found in excellent books such as Julian Jackson’s France: the Dark Years (2001), Azéma’s De Munich à la Libération (1979) and Ousby’s Occupation (1999). It is however necessary to highlight certain key events and acts which effectively influence any form of reflection on the period, in other words to outline the spaces, places, dates, conflicts, groups, organisms and figures which make up the history of resistance and collaboration, as well as the choices, attitudes and opinions which drive judgements about the veracity or rightness of particular acts and decisions. Before turning to specific topics related to resistance, collaboration and liberation, it is useful to examine some broader issues of a methodological sort, which are partly formal (relating to historiography and the historical acceptability of certain genres) and partly ethical and moral (most books on the Second World War usually rest on assumptions about good and evil, right and wrong, even if their authors do not always make their views explicit).
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Notes
Pierre Daninos in La Composition d’Histoire has produced an amusing analysis of the caricatural, jingoistic simplifications of historical subjects to be found in most school textbooks across the world, and he enumerates at length the howlers produced by pupils who have been instructed by such material (thus Hitler for one German teenager was ‘the first man to land on the moon’, 1979: 134). He concludes rather bleakly that ‘it is better to be ignorant than to be wrong’ (p. 92). However, Sellar and Yeatman, despite their amusing reduction of historical study to good things, top nations and waves, do offer a more persuasive and optimistic defence of the business: ‘The object of this History is to console the reader…History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.’ And half a centurybefore Francis Fukuyama, they note: ‘History is now at an end’ (1930: vii-viii).
Thus Robert A. Rosenstone argues that The notion of postmodern history seems like a contradiction in terms. The heart of postmodernism, all theorists agree, is a struggle against History. With a capital H. A denial of its narratives, findings, and truth claims’ (1995: 200).
The novelist G.M. Fraser amusingly contrasts his own recollections of the campaign in Burma with the austere and ordered account given in the official history of his unit in his book Quartered Safe Out Here (Harvill, 1992).
Michael Burleigh (2001: 5, 17) notes the absence of a moral dimension from much ‘modern historical writing, with its social science notions of freedom from value judgements, as if morality is related to moralising, rather than intrinsic to the human condition and philosophical reflection about it’. The Second World War demonstrates the brutal clash of two equally immoral totalitarian systems: ‘Both Communism, the systemisation of bourgeois guilt or self-loathing and working-class resentment cloaked in universal benignity, and fascism or Nazism, the solipsistic, quasi-tribal veneration of one race or nation, shared this antipathy towards the world of civility, decency, prudence, law and order, and explicitly glorified violence.’
See A. Guérin’s exhaustive Chronique de la Résistance (2000) for an extensive list of over 300 officially accredited networks and movements. The post-war struggle for acknowledgement by resistance movements is illustrated by the case of Francois Mitterrand’s Mouvement national des prisonniers de guerre et des déportés, which achieved official recognition as an ‘unite combattante de la Résistance’ as late as May 1992 (eleven years after Mitterrand’s election as president and after previous refusals). Legend has it that when Mitterrand offered the services of this POWs’ movement to de Gaulle on their first encounter in Algiers in December 1943, the General sarcastically suggested that a movement of hairdressers might be as useful, thereby inspiring the enmity which was to divide the two future presidents for the rest of their careers.
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© 2003 Christopher Lloyd
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Lloyd, C. (2003). Understanding and Representing the Occupation. In: Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503922_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503922_1
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