Introduction: France, 1940-1944: The Ambiguous Legacy (original) (raw)
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France 1939–1945: From strange defeat to pseudo‐liberation
Journal of labor and society, 2020
This essay provides a class‐analysis interpretation of France's role in World War II. Determined to eliminate the perceived revolutionary threat emanating from its restless working class, France's elite arranged in 1940 for the country to be defeated by its “external enemy,” Nazi Germany. The fruit of that betrayal was a victory over its “internal enemy,” the working class. It permitted installing a fascist regime under Pétain, and this “Vichy‐France”—like Nazi Germany—was a paradise for the industrialists and all other members of the upper class, but a hell for workers and other plebeians. Unsurprisingly, the Resistance was mostly working‐class, and its plans for postwar France included severe punishment for the collaborators and very radical reforms. After Stalingrad, the elite, desperate to avoid that fate, switched its loyalty to the country's future American masters, who were determined to make France and the rest of Europe free for capitalism. It proved necessary, however, to allow the recalcitrant leader of the conservative Resistance, Charles de Gaulle, to come to power. In any event, the “Gaullist” compromise made it possible for the French upper class to escape punishment for its pro‐Nazi sins and to maintain its power and privileges after the liberation.
The Other Side: Investigating the Collaborationists in World War II France
Ego-histories of France and the Second World War, 2018
Bertram Gordon’s ego-history discusses his research on the power of ideology in history, which was influenced by political radicalism during the 1960s in both France and America. After a doctoral dissertation on the Catholic Social movement in nineteenth-century Austria, Gordon turned his attention to Collaboration and the ‘collaborationists’ in World War II France. With French state archives for the war years closed during the writing of his book, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, this chapter discusses his use of German documentation and interviews with former collaborationists, including French Waffen-SS. It also highlights how his more recent interests on the history of food and tourism intersect with the history of France and the Second World War.
This famous quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, written in 1944, refers to a troubled and painful context: the years of occupation on French territory. Between resistance and collaboration, a whole grey area and an interlope world arise. The temptation to give in to fear, revenge or greed is opposed to involved acts, sublime in their selflessness. For the survivor Jorge Semprún, evil and good exist side by side in mankind, even in the state of exception of the concentration camp (G. Agamben). Neither can be eradicated or forbidden. Literature appears to be the proper space to expose these paradoxes and to suggest the ontological stake. Through a new corpus that has been very little studied until now, this comparative study aims to echo Sartre's assertion that “for the secret of a man is not his Oedipus complex, or inferiority complex, it is the very limit of his liberty, it is his power of resistance to torture and death” (Situations, III, 1948).
Les prisonniers de guerre allemands: France, 1944–1949, by Fabien Théofilakis
The English Historical Review, 2016
BOOK REVIEWS general the prose is not complex, unlike the weight of reflection and analysis it is required to carry. Although celebrated widely by historians on the left, the denseness and complexity of Una guerra civile left a vast space open for right-wing populists to exploit as Berlusconi and his neo-Fascist allies rose to power in the 1990s, and set about demolishing the Resistance 'myths' once and for all. This revisionist effort dominated the anniversary celebrations of 1995 and 2005. But the neo-Fascists split with Berlusconi in 2010, and faded away. The 2015 celebrations were the first in seventy years not to be dominated by the contingent political struggles between left and right of the moment, and passed by very quietly. In general, the economic crisis, which is also political and institutional, buried the old twentieth-century questions under a crushing weight of concern about the future. But Pavone's book will always remain as the outstanding monument to the Resistance movement in its philosophical and political dimensions. To the extent that this new edition in English generates heightened attention and respect from outside for the achievements of the partisan forces in Italy, that will be a measure of its success.
After the Fall: The Rhetoric of National-Moral Reconstruction in Occupied France, 1940-1944
Utilizing pre-existing scholarship on post-conflict reconstruction in twentieth-century Europe, as well as a variety of French primary sources, this thesis explores the concept of national-moral reconstruction as utilized by French political leaders in the wake of their country’s defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940. In particular, this study analyzes the competing discourses employed by the Vichy regime and the various organizations of the French Resistance, as each group sought to explain to a broader public both the causes of the French defeat, as well as the repercussions of the German occupation of the country from June 1940 to August 1944. While previous scholarship has emphasized the physical and/or economic dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction—especially when considered in the context of the Second World War—this thesis focuses on issues of cultural identity and national history/memory in order to look at how French political leaders hoped to reconstruct the moral and cultural, as opposed to the strictly physical, fabric of their country in the wake of the comprehensive social, political, and military disaster brought about by the German occupation.
This is a convincing thesis: something clearly did change during France's dark years. That said, there are problems with Broch's démarche. One problem concerns the concept of frustration, which is never clearly defined. With what-or with whom-were railway workers frustrated: the Vichy regime, Vichy authorities, the German occupiers, their superiors in the SNCF and beyond, wartime hardships, or something and someone else? Were railway workers more frustrated than others? If so, then why? Another problem concerns the expression of this frustration. There is the question of scope: in the case of sabotage, for example, it is not clear how extensive the phenomenon was before the lead-up to D-Day, nor whether it was primarily railway workers who sabotaged locomotives, freight cars, and tracks in the opening months of 1944. Broch relies on French sources for evidence, but it would be interesting to compare them with German sources, as the occupiers were hypersensitive to any signs of sabotage. In the chapter on protest, Broch focuses on "everyday resistance" evident in the "proliferation of acts of misconduct, disobedience, trickery, and even individual resistance" (125). But such acts are often difficult to measure and even to identify, to say nothing of the difficulties involved in assessing the political intent behind them. In the case of theft, Broch writes of an "epidemic," but the figures she cites (for France's southwest region) point to something less spectacular: a rise from just under 100 in 1939 to 250 in 1941 (97, 103-104). The phenomenon of theft also raises the question of alternative explanations. Occupied France, as Broch rightly emphasizes, suffered from growing shortages of almost all consumer (and other) goods-food, clothing, and so on. This situation gave railway workers, who enjoyed privileged access to scarce goods (and transport), enormous incentives to steal whether for personal consumption or for sale in wartime France's flourishing black markets. Indeed, what is striking is arguably not so much the rise in the number of thefts as its limited extent. On page 109 Broch provides a graph indicating a notable increase in thefts from the SNCF by non-SNCF employees from January 1942 to May 1944 but lower and stable numbers for SNCF workers and management. If, as it appears, the incentives and opportunities for theft were abundant, one question is why were SNCF employees seemingly less loath to steal than nonemployees? One answer might be in the lingering effects of the cheminots' prewar professional ethos.