Prof: Okay,
I want today to talk about collaboration,
but above all, resistance in Europe during
World War II. I'll talk mostly about France,
because that's where there's been so much written about,
and also because France coming to grips with the Vichy past was
not an evident thing. It was something that took a
long time. There was a process of sort of
collective and official repression about what had
happened. I want to talk about that.
Again, histories have their
histories. I've been around here long
enough that I can remember all this happening.
Not the war,
obviously, thank you, but France coming to grips with
its past. I want to talk about that.
We haven't talked about France
in a long time. I'm going to talk about that.
But first let me just say a
couple things. Other countries had their
resistors as well. It was obviously--the most
successful case of resistance was that of ex-Yugoslavia.
Well before the end of the war,
Marshal Tito and his partisans, taking advantage of the
mountains of ex-Yugoslavia, were able to pin down entire
German divisions, and with weapons parachuted in
by the allies, and with entire moving
hospitals, were able to launch the most
effective resistance, arguably, in Europe.
Of course, the case of the
Soviet Union, twenty-five million people
died. Twenty-five million people died
in World War II, most of them in the war,
but lots also in Stalin's camps.
A lot of partisans lost their
lives picking off German soldiers, in the case of Poland.
In the third edition there will
be more on this. They got scarcely a mention.
The Polish had a home army,
as they called it, of about 300,000 people by the
end of the war. The Warsaw ghetto rose up,
and was crushed with 12,000 deaths and with thousands of
other people sent away to the camps in 1943,
then the Warsaw uprising. One of the reasons that Warsaw,
where I'll be on Friday, and where I go fairly
often--there was nothing left, because the uprising was
crushed, and thousands and thousands of
people lost their lives. I just reviewed a book actually
for the Boston Globe called Ghettostadt,
which is an interesting book by a man called Gordon Horowitz,
who teaches in Illinois. It's about the Lodz ghetto.
It's a tragic,
all-to-familiar tale. It doesn't have anything to do
with resistance, because it was impossible,
but it was about the German ideas of creating this Aryan
city in Lodz, which was a big industrial
town, and still is, in Poland.
Of course, what they did is
they put all the Jews into the ghetto,
which was several kilometers square,
and put them to work making uniforms,
and ear muffs, and all sorts of things for the
German troops. In the story,
the most horrific aspect of it is that the people in the
ghetto, they don't really know. There's all these rumors about
what's happening outside. Of course, what's happening is
the killing fields, and three million Jews
disappear in Poland in World War II, three million,
three million. Gradually, and some people,
before they are being killed by the Nazis,
are forced to write cheery postcards saying,
"All is well here in these camps.
Everything is just
delightful." Then they're executed.
Gradually, it's about the
mounting horror of the people who live there.
They see clothes stacked up
outside the ghetto that they could recognize as having been
on people they knew, who had been shipped away to
the camps. The whole thing is so
horrendous. It lives with us today.
Obviously, it was easier to
resist in places in which you could hide.
When I talk about France,
the reason--and I sent this term around--you called the
French resistors the maquisards,
or even just les maquis, is because they were able to
hide behind brush called maquis.
More about this later.
So, resistance in Belgium,
which is in the flat country except for the Ardennes was
very, very difficult. There's hardly a hill that's
more than a hump in Denmark, but yet is was the Danes in
Copenhagen who saved the Jews, who got them out,
with the help of a German officer,
and were able to get them just across the very narrow straits
to Malmo in Sweden. Other countries had their
resistances as well. All those can't be covered now
in this short amount of time--why am I supposed to have
this glass here, actually?
It has a label on it.
I'm not supposed to have this
glass here at all--I guess what I'll do is I'm going to talk
about France and about the resistance there.
Now, until about 1969,
a year that I can remember, Altamont, the Mets win the
series, but more important, protests against the war in the
United States and mounting dissatisfaction with United
States foreign policy. I can remember that very,
very well. But until 1969,
in France the official line was virtually everybody resisted,
a few elites, a few notables,
rural elites collaborated, period.
The official line was one that
was very closely tied to Gaullism.
Because Charles de Gaulle,
the big guy, his voice crackles over June
18,1940. He calls on France to resist.
Part of the myth that everybody
resisted, or almost everybody,
and few people collaborated, had to do with the official
Gaullist policy, which is that Gaullists
resisted. Charles de Gaulle,
this mystical body of Charles de Gaulle,
the body being greater than the sum of all its parts,
led France, which essentially liberated
itself. Of course, that's simply not
true. Also, what that forgot about
was the fact that the communists were enormously important in the
resistance. More about that in a while.
There was a film made,
a documentary, I think in about 1953.
I've never actually seen it.
It had to do with the Jews.
It had to do with what happened
to the Jews in France. It was conveniently forgotten
that the Jews in Paris who were arrested,
in the Marais, in the Jewish section of Paris,
and in other places, too, were arrested by the French
police. The Germans would have been
happy to do it, but they didn't need to,
because the French police were so eager to do that.
In this film,
Jews and other people, communists and other people who
were sent away, were packed off to a place
called Drancy, which is,
if you've ever taken the RER in from the airport or to the
Roissy airport in Paris, you've gone through Drancy.
That was a transit camp.
In transit camps,
rather like Malines or Mechelen, in Belgium,
or Westerbok in the Netherlands quite near the German border,
these camps were run by French, Belgians, and Dutch,
They were not run by the Nazis. The Nazis would have been happy
to do it, but the local populations, the local
collaborators were doing that. In this film made in 1953,
in the original, you see a French gendarme who's
guarding the Jews at Drancy, isn't in the film.
In the documentary that was
finally released, somebody has reached in and
plucked him from the film. He simply disappears.
It's doctored.
The French gendarme,
with his French gendarme hat, isn't in the film,
because the myth was that the Jews were taken away by the
Germans, and that communist resistors
were shot by the Germans, and the gypsies and gay people
were taken away by the Germans, were arrested by the Germans,
and that France resisted and didn't collaborate.
Now, two events--let me also
tell you two stories. I hope I didn't say this the
first day when I was trying to get you interested in learning
about World War II. I worked in a place called
Tulle when I was doing my research for my dissertation,
long ago, and all that. I didn't have any money,
and I'd go down and buy an ice cream cone for lunch every day.
I started talking to this guy
and I didn't speak French very well then.
But I knew that there were a
lot of people hung there. Ninety-nine men were hung.
The Germans left.
The maquis,
the resistors, were very active there.
André
Malraux, the great writer, was active in a place called
Argentat near there. One day the Germans all left,
and then everybody came out and started partying,
and the Germans came back. They hung ninety-nine men from
poles in Tulle. One day I was there and this
guy was telling me this story about how he had hidden.
He had gone up--it's a real
windy town in a valley--he'd gone up and hidden.
You've got a house here and
you've got room under the house. He was able to hide and escape.
Because he was sixteen,
he would have been hung. This woman came up and I was
eating my ice cream cone. She ordered an ice cream cone.
The guy suddenly said,
"Madame Dupont, you remember that day,
don't you?" She said, "I sure do.
They hung my husband from that
pole." How every day you could live
with that and talk about that as if you were discussing where you
had bought something at a sale. But the next step to thinking
about that is who in France made all those things possible?
Who was helping the Germans do
that? The answer is that lots of
people collaborated. Lots of people got what they
wanted on a platter because of the Nazi victory.
The same people who were
shrieking "Better Hitler than Blum!"
in 1936 got exactly what they
wanted. Marshal Pétain,
who was a rabid anti-Semite, his national revolution was
essentially aimed to do in France what Hitler had done in
Germany, and what other petty despots
had done in other places, some not so petty, like Hitler.
They got what they wanted.
So, how did the official line
get shaken by reality? How did this happen?
Second story.
I have a friend who is still a
lawyer in Paris. I've known him for a long,
long, long time. He was too young to remember,
but his older brother, who's dead now,
remembered when the Germans came to his house in the
suburbs, a place called Le
Perreux-sur-Marne, took away the father,
who was a Greek Jew. Of course, he was taken away
and was killed. He ended up in one of the camps.
They don't know what happened
to him. Now, the Germans just didn't
come to that house by chance. The guy was denounced as a Jew
by the policeman in that town. After the war,
every Saturday when this lady, the widow, went to the market,
she walked by and saw this policeman directing traffic,
the same guy. Nothing ever happened to him.
Nothing ever happened to him.
So, how did the official
version get eliminated by historical reality?
Histories have their histories.
How did that happen?
There are two events that are
kind of key. They're both in what I sent
around. One is the movie,
The Sorrow and the Pity, which I mentioned in here
before, which was described as a two
six-pack movie in the old days when I used to show it here,
because it lasts four and a half hours.
It was a documentary made for
French television by Max Ophüls.
It was never shown on French
television until 1981. Why?
Because it was a documentary in
which collaborators--there's sort of a local notable called
Christian De la Mazière, who describes in his smoking,
his smoking, in his fancy jacket in the
château, why he fought alongside the
Nazis on the Eastern Front in the Waffen SS.
It's about collaboration and
resistance, tales of true heroism but also of repressed
memory. There's a great scene in which
they're walking through the school.
They ask about the teacher,
a teacher who disappeared. They don't even remember about
it. They don't remember it,
the guys that are being interviewed.
They've conveniently forgotten.
So, The Sorrow and the
Pity was never shown on French TV until 1981.
It's a fantastic thing.
It's too long,
and I should have never shown it.
I started showing it twice in
sections. Also, it's kind of dubbed and
it's very hard to understand either in French or in English.
It's a monument.
It's a monument not just
because it's a driving, forceful documentary,
but it helped France rediscover its past.
Fabulous.
Talking about the role of the
Communist Party. Again, I'm not a communist,
but I'm telling you, the Communist Party had an
enormous role in the resistance. Most of it's about
Clermont-Ferrand, the area.
It's based on the Auvergne town
of Clermont-Ferrand. There's this great scene where
these two peasants out in the countryside say,
"Nous sommes rouge, comme le vin,"
"We're red like the wine we're drinking."
It's a fabulous,
fabulous, fabulous thing. Of course, there's the
inevitable scene at the end where women who were called,
indelicately, "horizontal
collaborators," had their heads shaved and were
being paraded through the town. That happened all over the
place. Les tondeuses is what
you called them in French. It doesn't matter what you call
it in French. In the end, there's Maurice
Chevalier. Your grandparents will know who
Maurice Chevalier was, because he kind of represented,
in the American imagination, what France was.
He was a crooner.
He was a singer who was born in
L'Aiguillon-sur-Mer, which is in a proletarian edge
of Paris, right near where Edith Piaf,
the singer, was, whom your grandparents would
have heard of also, people way before my time.
But at the end of the movie
they have him and he's wearing his little crooning suit and he
says in English, "Well,
you know there are zees rumors that I was singing for
zee Germans. But I just want to tell you
that I was only singing for zee boys,"
that is, for the prisoners of war.
He was dealing with his own
past as well. Francois Mitterrand,
president of France for fourteen years beginning in
1981, when he was inaugurated,
the cameras follow him through the Panthéon.
He follows him by where the
heart or some part of Jean Jaurès is left.
But Francois Mitterrand,
when he was dying, he came to grips with his own
past. When he was dying,
he too, like France, said, "There was a moment
when I was not a resistor," which he became a resistor.
But there was a moment that he
had celebrated Vichy, and somebody had found a
picture of him in a right-wing rally in 1936 or 1937,
of which there were many in Paris.
He, too, came to grips with his
past. This all started,
the history of history started in the 1970s.
The second event was a book
published by my good friend Robert Paxton.
He's about ten years older than
me, probably more than that. He wrote a book called Vichy
France, published in 1972. Vichy France could not
use French archives, because they weren't available.
There's a fifty-year rule in
French archives. But there's also a
site--talking about the mutinies,
that the mutinies weren't available well after fifty years
had passed, after the mutinies in World War
I. So, he used captured German
documents, not French documents because they weren't available
to him. What he did in this book was to
show what Vichy and Pétain's national
revolution thought they were doing, and why many,
many people collaborated. There's a more recent book by a
guy called Philip Burrin that I use in the seminar on Vichy that
I do from time to time, a junior seminar,
which explores more deeply, using these archives that are
now available, the whole question of
collaboration. But the point that Paxton made
is that he demolished the shield argument,
the argument that Pétain and the national revolution had
saved the French State, and that they were a shield.
If it wasn't for Vichy,
worse things would have happened.
When Maurice Papon, P-A-P-O-N,
went on trial over eighty years of age,
went on trial for having signed away the lives of many Jews in
Bordeaux where he worked in the prefecture.
He made the same argument.
He said, "I was a good
bureaucrat. My superiors liked me.
If it hadn't been for me,
more Jews would have been shipped away to Drancy"
or, more directly, to the camps.
He was condemned.
He died a couple years ago.
He was under house arrest.
The most amazing part of the
whole trial was he managed to escape at age eighty.
People drove him to the Swiss
border and they found him in a fancy Swiss restaurant and
brought him back. But Papon had gone on to a very
distinguished career as a bureaucrat in the Fourth and
Fifth republics, as did a lot of other
salauds, a lot of other bastards,
such as René Bousquet, who was a prefecture police.
The argument was the shield
argument. "If it wasn't for us,
things would have been worse."
But as Paxton wrote very,
very memorably, Pétain might have
provided continuity for the French state,
but not for the French nation. The French nation,
what was and is, I hope and I'm proud to say,
based on liberty, fraternity, equality.
They take those off the coins
and it becomes "family, country, work."
It used to be when I was there
when I was a kid, you could see still these
little coins from Vichy that they transformed into
centimes. Paxton's book--I saw him once
when I was in Brussels. I saw him on a TV show,
my wife and I did. It was one of those typical
French shows, where it will be about World
War II and they'll have somebody who remembered the war,
somebody who was in the war, somebody who didn't even know
what was going on, and all this stuff,
and they interview them. Some guy got up,
this sort of rightwing guy, and there was protesting
against Paxton's presence by skinheads.
They got up and said,
"Mr. Paxton, what could you possibly know
about the war? You were only twelve years old
during the war?" But Paxton became,
this was an important part of the history of history.
When he was introduced at the
Sorbonne, he was introduced by a historian called Jean-Pierre
Azéma. When he introduced him,
he said, "Messr. Paxton, dans un certain
sens, vous êtes le conscience
de la France," "In a certain sense you,
Paxton, are the conscience of
France." These two events are important
in the emergence of what the historian Henry Rousso calls the
"Vichy Syndrome." Vichy was conveniently
forgotten, because of Gaullism or because
of not wanting to remember the bad things that had happened,
the collaborators, the eager anti-Semites.
Now, since the early 1970s,
people are obsessed with Vichy. There's all sorts of good work
that's been done on Vichy, and the whole period of
resistance and collaboration. Paxton estimated in that book
that two percent of the French population resisted.
My friend John Sweets,
who did a book called Choices in Vichy France,
a great title in which he looked at Clermont-Ferrand,
because that was where the movie The Sorrow and the
Pity were focused on. He estimates,
depending on how you define resistance,
people that refused to get off the sidewalk when a German
officer passed, or people that whistled in the
documentaries, the German newsreels before the
movie, and the theater, that something like sixteen or
eighteen percent of the population resisted.
It's a more charitable
definition of resistance. The fact is,
and I won't talk too much more about this, but the
collaboration was widespread. It was not simply an elite.
The elites were more apt to
collaborate earlier in the war. Later in the war the kinds of
people who joined the militia, which formed in January 1943,
which was the French equivalent of the Gestapo,
tended to be sort of down and out.
They were the kinds of people
who in Germany joined the SS, many of them in the 1920s,
saw it as a form of social mobility.
There's a really good film
called Lacombe Lucien, that I haven't seen in years,
about somebody who--between his ears there wasn't very much.
The resistance doesn't want him
because he's just kind of an idiot who doesn't believe in
anything. But the militia's very happy to
have him, and it's about what happens to him in the southwest
of France. During the Papon trial,
which was maybe about eight years ago,
or something like that, there was one time they
interviewed a German officer who was still alive.
They said, "Look,
what are your memories of Papon and the militia?"
He said, "If we got a
gar, a guy, if we arrested a French guy and
we rather liked him, we wouldn't turn him over to
the militia, because they would torture him
so hideously." Of course, the Germans were
capable of and did all over the place torture people hideously,
no doubt about that. But the militia were generally
bad, bad, bad guys. You saw this in Lacombe,
Lucien a little bit. That restaurant scene is so
crucial in Lacombe Lucien.
That is really the essence of
that film, in Lacombe, Lucien, the restaurant
scene when they're in there. Collaborators were everywhere.
At the end of the war probably
about 25,000 people were executed after very short trials
or simply gunned down. Near where we live in
Ardèche, there was a priest in a village
not too far away from us. He had Déat--;I think it
was him-- who was a real fascist, to lunch.
After the war,
they put him up against his own church and gunned him down.
I have an acquaintance a long
time ago who worked in the archives in Limoges,
where I spent a lot of time. He was a young man then,
and was a refugee from Lorraine.
After the war everybody was
celebrating. He lived in a place called
Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, which is near Limoges.
They were all partying in this
little town that's twelve kilometers away from Limoges.
Somebody said,
"Where's the gendarme who sold people down the
river?" Someone said,
"He's got an aunt in Limoges."
So they left all the casts of
wine that were left. They marched into Limoges,
went to the aunt's house, got the guy,
hauled him out, put him at the beginning of
this procession, joyous but also a deadly
serious procession, sort of an enraged charivari,
and they got him back to where he had done great damage.
They put him against the wall
and prrrt. Then they went back to partying.
There was lots of settling of
scores. Sometimes not everybody who had
their score settled deserved it. There were cases of people who
were misidentified, or simply there were rivalries,
but lots of people got theirs. As for Marshal Pétain,
what happened to Pétain, he was put on trial.
He was an old, old man.
They said, "You can't
execute an old, old man.
He's senile."
He wasn't at all.
But you can't execute an old
man who was the hero of Verdun, can you?
So, they put him in house
confinement on an island. There were still people trying
to get to the island, which is off the coast of
Brittany, and bring back his bones to Verdun.
That happened only about ten or
twelve years ago. So, France--it took a lot
longer than the kind of gunning people down and the trials that
went on after the war for France to come to grips with his past.
Now, resistance.
What do we know about
resistance? First of all,
obviously it was easier to resist in the south than the
north, because of the topography.
One of the reasons why the
Germans occupied so-called free France in November of 1942 was
the fact that resistance had already started.
The first active case of
resistance with important consequences in Paris was at the
Metro stop called Barbès-Rochechouart,
which is now one of those places where the police,
especially since Sarkozy was elected,
they have these raffles, where anyone of color is
immediately asked for their ID and made to stand there and be
humiliated by the police. Anyway, back then somebody
gunned down a German officer, and gradually acts of
resistance started. To repeat what I said before,
the word maquis comes from a very thick brush that's
in Corsica and in what they call in French the garrigue,
also. It's a rocky part of the south.
We have it around where we
live, too. But it was just sort of a
metaphor for places that you could hide.
You had to be out there hiding.
By 1944, by certainly the
spring of 1944, and in many places earlier than
that, the maquis ruled, at least at night.
During the day they didn't.
Only twice in France did they
foolishly try to take on German militarized units,
big units. One near Clermont-Ferrand and
the other is near the Vercors, which is near Grenoble,
near the Alps. They were just wasted.
They were just destroyed.
In a village near us,
somebody denounced people who were up in the hills,
up in the Cévennes mountains.
One day the motorized units
come, and the parachutes come, and they're toast.
That's the end of it.
There were a bunch of
slaughters down around where we live.
People don't like to talk about
what happened. I wanted to interview somebody
who was a resistor in our village, even though our village
isn't where there was a lot of resistance going on.
I wanted to talk to him because
I was writing a book about our village called
Mémoires de pierres.
He agreed to come over and talk
about it, then he simply never showed up.
People didn't like to talk
about things like that. He never did want to discuss it.
Obviously, more resistance was
in the south than in the north, though it's forgotten often
that there was a lot of resistance in Paris,
that there was Jewish resistance in Paris,
too. I met a guy in Australia eight
years ago who made a lot of money making cakes,
and then went back and got his Ph.D.
in history working with a
friend of mine, Peter McPhee.
He wrote a book on the Jewish
resistance published by Oxford, the Jewish resistance in Paris,
a guy called Jacques Adler, who is happily still around.
But the most famous cases that
you all know about are these resistors who are living off the
land in Auvergne, or in the Savenne Mountains,
or anywhere that you could hide there would be.
Often in French cities you can
see plaques saying, "Resistors met here to
organize resistance." That's what they did.
They took big, big chances.
When they, for example,
blew up railroad tracks--there were so many communist
resistors, and the Communist Party had a
big hold on cheminots, the railroad workers.
When you go to railroad
stations, Rouen, Lille, anywhere you go you see
huge lists. Any railroad station you go to
in France, huge lists of people who were
killed during the war, either fighting the resistance
or were shot because they were involved with sabotage.
It doesn't take much to blow up
a track. They did it all the time,
down in the Rhone Valley constantly.
There was this woman who was a
big-time collaborator in the northern part of the
Ardèche, where the awful Xavier Vallat
came from, too. He was minister of Jewish
affairs, totally unrepentant. That meant that he was shipping
Jews away to be killed. That's what he was doing.
She was a collaborator.
One day she walked across the
bridge to go shopping on the other side of the Rhone,
and they blew her head away. But when you did that,
you knew that they were going to pay you back so much.
It's when Heydrich--I went to
see where Heydrich was assassinated near Prague.
When Heydrich was assassinated
by Czech resistors in 1942, they took an entire village and
killed everybody in the village, a place called Lidice,
everybody in the village, hundreds and hundreds of people
were massacred. They were capable of doing
anything. But the point is that in all
these countries there were people who were very,
very happy to see that happen. If you go to Budapest,
when you see the shoes of all the people that were pushed,
shot, or just thrown into the
swirling water of the Danube, it was Hungarians pushing the
Jews there. It was the Hungarians shipping
the Jews off to Auschwitz. There were people in every
place who were happy to see these things happen.
The big lie in Germany is
people didn't know. Of course, people knew.
They knew.
And they knew in France, too.
They knew, absolutely.
It fit into the xenophobia.
It fit into Vichy's vision of
what France would be, a vision in which the Catholic
Church would have a much greater role.
There were two people executed
for abortion during the time, a corporatist ethic,
where like Mussolini's corporatism,
you'd eliminate class struggle by having everybody in vertical
organizations. Everybody's happy to be French,
or happy to be Italian, or happy to be German,
and you forget the fact that your employer makes ten times
more than what you do. The kind of embrace of
"peasantism," the resurgence of Joan of Arc.
Joan of Arc became identified
with Pétain, as saving France and all of
that. It's all very familiar stuff.
They had a plan and the
national revolution was something they wanted to do.
My good friend,
Eric Jennings, who teaches in Toronto,
wrote a fantastic book called Vichy in the Tropics.
He looked at Guadalupe,
Indochina, and Madagascar. In those places,
you couldn't say, "The Nazis made us do
it," because there weren't any Nazis there.
There were no German troops in
those places. In Vietnam there were
twenty-seven Jews, and they are desperately trying
to find these twenty-seven Jews to send them to the death camps
so far away, or to kill them themselves.
The shield argument doesn't
work. They collaborated.
In the end, a lot of them got
what they wanted. As so far as the resistance,
we've always focused on males, because the idea is you've got
all these Spanish refugees from the civil war,
from Franco and you've got all working-class people and you've
got peasants and there are all these males.
Yes, they were there,
but somebody had to darn their socks.
Somebody had to provide them
with food. Somebody had to carry messages.
It's more than just one of
these old movie things of the very young,
attractive woman is carrying a message,
and charming the guards so they don't frisk her or stop her at
all. But that happened.
You had to never be so stupid
as to have a written message, but you were carrying verbal
messages. In places you could hide food,
such as where we live, or out near where we live.
Somebody has to take these
people food. Also, another thing is the
Catholic Church, this business about the pope
helping Jews is just sheer nonsense and nobody should ever
be tricked by that. But the complicated role of the
Catholic Church in France, there was the archbishop of
Toulouse, who was a very courageous guy
who said, "Don't hurt anybody,"
who was encouraging really resistance implicitly.
The archbishop of Albi,
which is only an hour drive if that from Toulouse,
he seemed an outright collaborator.
In many places,
Catholic clergy who are opinion leaders in their village,
along with the schoolteachers, were very,
very important in helping give a moral kind of stamp to acts of
resistance. There's a good book on the
resistance by a guy called H.R. Kedward.
He's got two books about the
resistance, one about resistance in urban areas,
particularly Lyons and Montpellier, and how people kind
of got together. You had to be careful about who
you talked to. You're waiting for a train,
the train is late because it's the war, you're kind of feeling
each other out. But you'd better be damn
careful you're not talking to some denouncer.
You're toast if you talk to the
wrong person. But it's about how you can make
resistance happen. It's about, for example,
printing out just little type scripted things that say,
"Do not come and hear the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
when they play in Lyons." All you do is you get on a bus
with those things, and you're in the back seat,
and the bus turns the corner and you just let them go.
The wind takes them.
His other book that's really
good is called In Search of the Maquis,
which is about precisely what I'm talking about.
It's about the resistance in
the south, and looking at people who resisted.
He has an interesting story.
There were a lot of villages
that were Protestant villages that suffered greatly during all
the wars of religion. A couple were noteworthy in
that after the wars of religion, the king had these huge mission
crosses, huge crosses of conquest put up
over the village, which were essentially
Protestant and remained Protestant villages.
Did those signs help identify
the Catholic Church that had been the enemy of those
Protestants in the old days with Vichy?
Quite possibly.
But it's what John Sweets
called "choices in Vichy France."
Things happened that made you
take a choice. What was one of those things?
The most important was the STO,
the service du travail obligatoire,
which I wrote in the notes, the "obligatory work
service." The deal was basically that if
you agreed to work in a German factory, they would let
prisoners of war go and all that.
It doesn't work out like that.
These people were fools.
Two people from our village
went. One was dead drunk.
Someone told him he was going
to a party. So, he got on the bus.
The next stop is the Rhineland.
Of course, those people are
wasted by the bombing, because the Allies are the
masters of the air for the last couple years of the war.
They systematically devastate
those factories. A lot of those people in the
STO that went were killed, left the earth.
What the STO did is it made
people take a choice. If you didn't show up on the
9^(th) of February, or you pick the date,
1944, you didn't go. If you're sitting in your
village, they're going to come and take you.
At that point--choices in
Vichy, France--;"I'm going to go in the resistance,"
big choice. You go in the resistance.
You live off the land.
Sometimes just a couple people,
sometimes lots of people, international mix.
Lots of Poles were there,
lots of Spaniards, but most of the people were
French. One of the interesting things
is that the resistance itself did not,
unlike almost every big political event in France since
the Revolution to 1981, did not follow traditional
lines between right and left. Leftwing regions did not have a
monopoly on the resistance. There was tons of resistance in
Brittany. There was tons of resistance in
Normandy. Eisenhower after the war said
the French resistance was worth an entire division,
or two divisions, I can't remember exactly what
he said. Of course, they helped prepare
the way in Normandy for the invasion of June 6,1944.
That old left-right dichotomy
does not work in terms of regions.
It does work in terms of what
people were more likely to resist.
Working people were more likely
to resist, because their unions had been
broken by Vichy, because they were more apt to
have supported the Popular Front.
"No to the France of the
aperitif" was the cry of the right in
1936. "No to the France of
drinking before lunch," and all of this.
"No to the France of the
Jew Blum." "Better Hitler than
Blum" over and over again. Working people and peasants,
like the ones who said, "Nous sommes rouge,
comme le vin," that I mentioned before,
are more apt to resist. Now, why does the Communist
Party have such a privileged role in the resistance?
After the war,
they called themselves the party of 75,000 martyrs.
That may be an exaggeration,
but not by much. Whenever there was a shooting,
whenever there was a Nazi gunned down,
whenever there was a railroad track blown up,
carrying munitions, carrying soldiers,
carrying whatever, whenever they couldn't get
through, who were the ones who are
first, when they go to the mayor and
say, "Who do you want
shot?" The communists would be the
first to go, always. The forts around Paris and
these other places, there were communists put up
against the wall all the time. They were the most likely to
resist, along with other Gaullists.
Jean Moulin,
the prefect of the Eure-et-Loir who was hideously tortured
without revealing any secrets, was one who was sent out to try
to unify the resistance. Why were the communists so
effective? Because the Communist Party are
organized into cells. We still get little notices in
our mailbox saying that the Communist Party,
the cell of Balazuc where we live,
all four people in the Communist Party are going to
meet together and to drink illegal wine,
to drink a wine called Clinton. I was once asked to describe
the fall of capitalism. I had to say,
"It's really not falling yet."
The point is that they were
already organized. These networks were not
destroyed by the war, were not destroyed by it.
They existed, the comradeship.
If you were a communist,
you'd been a communist since the 1930s, you trusted those
people. You were apt to fall in with
them. There were two people,
one of whom is still alive. He spent a lot of time in
prison in Paris, a painter.
He's now ninety-five.
He's a friend of mine.
He and his wife,
the first vacations, they took a double bike.
They pedaled all the way from
Paris down to our village, which they had subsequently
made their home. They joined the Communist Party
in 1933 and 1935. He was a big time resistor.
He was damn lucky to escape
with his life. He was scheduled to be executed
and he wasn't. He painted people in the prison.
I've seen his paintings.
The socialists weren't
organized in that way. Sometimes after the war the
communists said, "Aha!
The socialists weren't the big
resistors." Well, many did, individually.
Léon Blum was lucky not
to have been executed. He survived the war in prison.
He was put on trial at a place
called Riom, right near Clermont-Ferrand.
He survives the war.
But there was a Catholic
resistance. I have very old friends,
much older than me, who went from the leftwing
Catholic resistance into the Communist Party,
into the Socialist Party, kind of the normal trajectory
of those things among militants. They were resistors also.
Protestants are more known for
having resisted because of some very famous events.
But remember,
only five percent of the French population is Protestant.
There's a village called Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon, which in Haute-Loire,
but near Ardèche. They had a cottage industry of
making fake IDs for Jewish children from Lyons and
Saint-Étienne who were kept in this small village and
who were saved, who were saved because of these
people. Whenever the Germans would come
through, which wasn't that often,
they would hide the children, or the Germans would go through
and say, "My god, there are a lot of children.
Well, these are practicing
Catholics, aren't they?" They weren't.
They were practicing
Protestants. Those are the more famous
cases, but lots of people resisted.
Lots of people resisted,
but lots of people collaborated,
and many other people were indifferent.
That's the way it is.
I want to close with a story of
Oradour-sur-Glane, because somebody who wrote this
book called Martyred Village, both in French,
chez Gallimard, and in English with Cal Press,
was somebody who took this course with me a long time ago,
and was in Ezra Stiles College, Sarah Farmer.
There was a village near
Limoges where, when the Germans were leaving,
they were leaving, getting the hell out,
going north after this massacre in Tulles that I alluded to.
Suddenly they show up in the
village and they shoot all the men,
and they put the men, and the women,
and the children, in a church and they kill them.
They blow the church up.
One woman escaped through the
little window. A very thin lady escaped
through the little window behind it.
They destroyed the entire
village. People who had taken the tram
to the market in Limoges came back and there was nothing.
Everybody was dead, dead.
They left this village standing
the way it always--it's still there.
Now there's a center of memory.
One of my friends is the
director of it. Sarah Farmer wrote a book about
it. But what's important about it
is that this was the site chosen, the site chosen to
commemorate the war. Why?
Because it was virgin,
no collaborators supposedly, no resistors supposedly.
Martyred Village.
It turned out more complicated
than that. It's a wonderful book,
Martyred Village, Sarah Farmer.
But what shows the complexity
of it is what happened afterwards.
The people in this village were
gunned down. The women and children were
killed by some Germans, but lots of them were Alsatian,
who were brought directly into the German army.
So, they went on trial in 1953.
There were riots in Colmar,
in Strasbourg, that they should ever be put on
trial. They called themselves the
malgré nous, the "in spite of
ourselves." There were riots in Limoges
that the penalties were so mild. Some of them were let go if
they had not joined voluntarily. The others went to jail.
The man who apparently ordered
the massacre, a guy called Franz Lammerding,
they were various attempts to kidnap him from Germany and
bring him back to France, but he died a natural death in
the 1970s or 1980s. This was the enormous,
ironic complexity of the whole thing,
of getting into the history of history,
of trying to understand what happened during those years,
that some of the murderers in this case were Alsatian,
and therefore French, until Hitler invades in 1940.
So, collaboration and
resistance. Great subjects for study,
but heartbreaking, just absolutely tragic.
The Nazis would be happy to do
all of the stuff on their own, but the xenophobia,
the anti-Semitism led to those cases of the guys going up the
stairs in Paris, and in other cities,
and all the patrons signing lives away were French.
So, France, as in other
countries, it's happening in Belgium, too,
are coming to grips with their past.
So, it's been a sad pleasure to
talk about that.
