Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance
By Robert Gildea, Belknap Press, 608 pages, $35
On May 31, 1944, 22-year-old Marianne Cohn, one of the first couriers for the organisation of Jewish scouts, was arrested by a German patrol as she was smuggling 28 Jewish children across the border from France into Switzerland. In prison earlier she had written what would become one of the defining poems of the Vichy years: “I shall betray tomorrow, not today. / Today, pull out my fingernails, / I shall not betray. / You do not know the limits of my courage, / I, I do ... ”
On the night of July 8, the Gestapo took Cohn and five other members of the resistance to an isolated spot and beat them to death with spades. She could have been rescued, but she refused, fearing repercussions against the children.
Cohn’s story perfectly illustrates an important aspect of Robert Gildea’s new history of the French resistance: that there were many extremely brave women and many Jewish ones, that the risks they took were enormous, and that for the most part they have not been sufficiently recognised.
Had it not been for her poem, it is unlikely that anyone would have heard of Cohn. Of the 1,038 people made Compagnons de le Libération after the war, just 0.6 per cent were women. It was only in May this year that Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle, two of France’s most admired resisters, were honoured by symbolic reburial in the Panthéon in Paris.
The French resistance, as Gildea writes, has always been both central to the identity of France and a subject of myths. When France was liberated in the summer of 1944, it needed a myth of grandeur to allow the French to take their place at the table of victors. The theme that France was a nation that resisted had started with De Gaulle’s speech on BBC radio from London on June 18, 1940, continued through a series of heroic acts of sabotage and military valour, and culminated in his triumphal march down the Champs Elysées on August 26, 1944. True, there had been collaborators, but they had been no more than a few rotten apples, quickly tried and sentenced.
“Paris liberated!” De Gaulle famously declared, “Liberated by its own efforts!” As Gildea rightly observes, the myth that took shape was “military, national and male”.
Though never totally believed, it endured in one form or another right through the Algerian war, through the showing of Marcel Ophuls’s film about collaboration in Clermont-Ferrand, “Le Chagrin et la Pitié” — kept off television, for which it was originally made, for 10 years — and through Robert Paxton’s seminal work on Vichy and the Jews.
It was not really until Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, “Shoah”, and the trials of Vichy’s most egregious antisemitic collaborators, Paul Touvier, Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon, in the late 1980s and 1990s, along with the work of Beate and Serge Klarsfeld in documenting the systematic round up and deportation of the Jews, that the myth began to fray.
Even so, the period since the Second World War has been marked more by what’s forgotten than what’s remembered. What Gildea set out to do was to uncover the reality of the French resistance, no easy task in a field mired in controversy, contested history, suspicion, ill-feeling and guilt.
It is revealing that as late as 1997, efforts were still being made to discredit Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, the almost insanely bold resisters in Lyon, by blaming them for the betrayal of Jean Moulin to the Gestapo. In France this whole area remains fresh, toxic.
Gildea has benefited not only from documents long kept closed, but from the vast literature that has been building up over the past 20 years, in the form of memoirs, oral testimonies and local histories. Focusing much of his book on individual stories, he gives a voice to the young who scorned Marshal Pétain’s youth organisations and set up resistance groups of their own, to the men and women who spied on German military movements, wrote anti-Nazi propaganda, ran networks to help Jews get out of France, hid those on the run from the Gestapo from one end of France to the other, or left to join De Gaulle’s Free French in London.
They were not, as he points out, all that numerous: most French men and women, during the four cold and ugly “années noires” of German occupation, preferred to lie low, reach some kind of inner accommodation with Vichy, and wait it out. But the many thousands of individuals — Catholics, Protestants, Jews, foreigners, communists — who refused to accept what France had become were often, like Cohn, extraordinarily brave.
As Gildea suggests, it would surely be more accurate, when writing of these times, to speak not of “the French resistance”, but of “resistance in France”.
In his ambitious overview of the Vichy years, Gildea devotes several chapters to the closing months, to the rivalry and feuding between De Gaulle and General Giraud over who would lead and rule postwar France, and to the bitter internecine struggles of the different parts of the resistance as they prepared for the Allied landings.
Because less has been written about it, his section on the jostling for power by the Free French, the Armistice army, the communist resistance organisations and the Allies, all of whom wanted a stake not only in the liberation but in what came next, makes fascinating reading.
A fact never sufficiently noted is that as late as July 1944, the Americans were still hesitating about whether to offer some kind of deal to Vichy, rather than to endorse De Gaulle as political leader. Although Gildea does a valiant job of teasing out the different players, it is not always easy to follow events as alliances shift, betrayals occur, leading figures are ousted or turn up in other guises.
The longed-for liberation meant very different things to different people. “I talk to him of ‘resistance’,” Gildea quotes a resistance leader meeting De Gaulle. “He answers: ‘Nation’. He believes he is the Nation incarnate.” The provisional government headed by De Gaulle famously included very few members of the internal resistance.
There have been many excellent recent books, both in French and in English (by François Boulet, Philippe Bourrin, Carmen Callil, Katy Hazan, H.R. Kedward, Ian Ousby and many others) on France during the resistance years. What Gildea has done is to step back and look at the wider picture, thereby providing a context for the individual acts of courage, which he celebrates in moving detail.
He gives recognition to the widest range of participants, many of them little known, and to the categories who did not fit well into the postwar myth of heroism, and that is perhaps his most important contribution to the field.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
