Complicity, Collaboration, and Resistance: France under the Nazi Occupation

By Clémence Boulouque

Complicity, Collaboration, and Resistance provides an intimate portrait of France under the Nazi occupation. In this ebook, readers will encounter diaries, letters, and memoirs—some translated into English for the first time—from political and religious leaders, intellectuals, immigrants and citizens, Jews and non-Jews, resisters, and collaborators. By including the voices of ordinary people, Complicity, Collaboration, and Resistance invites readers to move beyond a simple appraisal of France’s relationship to the Holocaust. Instead, the rich testimonies of life, framed by Columbia University professor Clémence Boulouque’s historical commentary, highlight the complexities of daily decision-making faced by those living under the Nazi occupation. Readers new to this period in French history, as well as those already familiar with it, will value the opportunity to reflect on the history and the questions it raises about guilt, responsibility, courage, and compassion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facing History and Ourselves
• Release date: Nov 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781940457178

Book preview

COMPLICITY, COLLABORATION, AND RESISTANCE

France under the Nazi Occupation

Clémence Boulouque

A Facing History and Ourselves publication

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives. For more information about Facing History and Ourselves, please visit our website at www.facinghistory.org.

Copyright © 2015 by Facing History and Ourselves. All rights reserved.

Facing History and Ourselves® is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

ISBN: 978-1-940457-17-8

Cover photo credit: German Federal Archives

Acknowledgments

Facing History and Ourselves wishes to thank Pascale and Richard Berner for their critical support and encouragement of this project, and particularly for introducing us to Clémence Boulouque to enable its realization.

We are profoundly grateful to the many individuals who contributed their energy and expertise. We thank Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat for serving as an invaluable source of guidance and feedback to the writer as she researched and wrote the manuscript. We are also grateful to have received the generous input of Daniel Cohen on an early draft of the manuscript. A big thank you to Peter Sager who translated many of the testimonies, diaries, and memoirs that serve as the heart of this project, making some available in English for the first time. Thank you also to Steve Krief for his hard work securing the licenses for all these primary and secondary sources. The writer also wishes to thank her mother for locating many of the rare texts that enrich the range of voices from France that this manuscript brings forward.

We also extend gratitude to the many Facing History and Ourselves staff members who made significant contributions. Adam Strom served as an editorial partner to the writer Clémence Boulouque throughout and was integral in finalizing the project’s content. Roger Brooks and Karen Murphy provided thoughtful input and direction on a draft of the manuscript. Anika Bachhuber and Samantha Landry moved the writing and production forward in countless ways. Wilkie Cook helped begin the coordination of the manuscript, and Catherine O’Keefe and Alissa Parra attended to many details entailed in transforming it into its polished form. Finally, we extend thanks to our development, web, and program teams for their critical roles in this project. ■

Preface

Adam Strom

One of the ways we make sense of history is to relate the events of the past to the choices we make in our own lives. But this can be tricky business. Thinking about the past through the lens of the present can blind us to the particularities of the situations we are trying to understand. And yet, even before fully grasping history in all its detail, we begin making comparisons—often facile and unreliable. The temptation to ask What would I have done? is hard to resist. The question helps to reinforce a recognition of the moral and ethical dimensions of the events in the past that are too often left out when teachers, trying to meet the demands of the curriculum, are forced to sweep through hundreds of years of history in a single semester.

Instead of dismissing the What would I have done? question, this book asks us to suspend it, leaving it hanging above our heads as Clémence Boulouque presents a close-up portrait of France under the Nazi occupation. It is in the details that we understand that there was not one France under the occupation, but two. There was no one, single experience of life during those years, but millions of them, and each choice that was made was shaped by the particular circumstances of the moment. With those details, we can shift the line of questioning from one that is primarily about ourselves to one that faces history. What choices were available to people in the past? What factors influenced the choices that they made? What were the consequences of the actions that they took? In asking those questions, we develop historical empathy, which is seeing the past from the point of view of those living at the time.

After providing an introduction to the history of France under the Nazi occupation, Boulouque surrounds us with voices, documents, and memories of France from 1940 to 1945, each challenging us to look deeper. Boulouque merely frames the sources, asking us to do our best to step into the history. That can be disorienting. I am sure each of us will encounter names, references, and words we do not know, and yet it is our job to press on and sift through the evidence to confront the past on its own terms.

The goal of this book is not to tell you what to think about the past, or to provide an answer to the question that animates the book: Was France during World War II a nation of resisters or complicit with the Nazis? The goal is to help you draw your own conclusions and make your own argument. It would be historically arrogant to do anything else. For those living in France under the occupation, or under Vichy rule, there were no clear instructions on how to live a moral and ethical life; there certainly were none if people hoped to steer clear of endangering themselves and their families.

In his insightful book When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944, Ronald Rosbottom explains, The massively defeated French found themselves in a quandary. Had not their government signed an armistice with the Germans? Had not a war hero, the estimable Marechal Phillipe Pétain, become chef de l’État français? . . . No one dreamed in the midsummer of 1940 that more than 1,500 days would pass before Parisians would be free of their hereditary enemy.1

Life lessons and the rules of what to do and what not to do were negotiated, not by the standards of our time, but of theirs. Those actions had real consequences—for individuals and their families, for Jews and others who were targets of the regime, and even for those living in France today.

In When Paris Went Dark, Rosbottom presents a list of 33 Tips for the Occupied created by Jean Texeceir, a journalist from Normandy in the early days of the Nazi occupation of Paris. The tips were collected on a flier that was stuffed into apartment mailboxes, slid under doors, and placed on café chairs.2 The excerpt below begins to reveal some of the uncomfortable intimacy created by the occupation.

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Street vendors offer them [German soldiers] maps of Paris and conversation manuals; tour buses unload waves of them in front of Notre-Dame and the Panthéon; each one of them has a little camera screwed to his eye. Don’t be fooled: they are not tourists.

They are conquerors. Be polite to them. But do not, to be friendly, exceed this correct behavior. Don’t hurry [to accommodate them]. In the end, they will not, in any case, reciprocate.

If one of them addresses you in German, act confused and continue on your way.

If he addresses you in French, you are not obliged to show him the way. He’s not your traveling companion.

If, in the café or restaurant, he tries to start a conversation, make him understand, politely, that what he has to say does not interest you.

If he asks you for a light, offer your cigarette. Never in human history has one refused a light, even to the most traditional enemy. . . .

The guy you buy your suspenders from has decided to put a sign on his shop: MAN SPRICHT DEUTSCH (we speak German). Go to another shop, even if he doesn’t speak the language of Goethe. . . .

Show an elegant indifference, but don’t let your anger diminish. It will eventually come in handy. . . .

You complain because they order you to be home by 9:00 p.m. on the dot. You are so naive; you didn’t realize that it’s so you can listen to English radio? . . .

You won’t find copies of these tips at your local bookshop. Most likely, you only have a single copy and want to keep it. So make copies for your friends, who will make copies, too. This will be a good occupation for the occupied.3

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As the occupation dragged on, the choices and the consequences of those negotiations grew ever grimmer. It would be too easy to assume we know what we would have done under those circumstances. Yet, by facing the history, in all its particularity, and even by trying to make sense of it through our own experiences, we will not only have a better understanding of the past, we will also help to develop a framework for the moral and ethical decisions we face in our own lives. ■

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Ronald C. Rosbottom. When Paris