Reframing remembrance: Contemporary French cinema and the Second World War

By Lisa Harper Campbell

Reframing remembrance examines films about the Nazi Occupation of France, charting how this period has been commemorated and how it has affected the articulation of French national identity. The book proposes that 1995 marked the beginning of a new approach to commemoration, reflected by socio-political acts, such as Jacques Chirac’s July 1995 Vél’ d’Hiv speech, and artistic acts, most notably films set during the Occupation. This is an approach that embraces critical engagement with history and its retelling. With relevance to countries beyond France and events far removed from the Second World War, Reframing remembrance highlights the need for ongoing, honest remembrance and self-reflection as cultural representations of history continue to shape contemporary views about nations’ identities and their global responsibilities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526154071

Book preview

Reframing remembrance

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Reframing remembrance

Contemporary French cinema and the Second World War

Lisa Harper Campbell

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Lisa Harper Campbell 2021

The right of Lisa Harper Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5406 4 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit:

Kristin Scott Thomas in Elle s’appelait Sarah

(dir. Gilles Paquet-Brenner, 2010).

Credit: Hugo Productions / Alamy.

Cover design:

Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Note on translations

Introduction

1 Resistance: Lucie Aubrac, Bon Voyage, Les Femmes de l’ombre and L’Armée du crime

2 Collaboration: Les Misérables, La Rafle and Elle s’appelait Sarah

3 The dichotomy dilemma: Laissez-passer, Effroyables Jardins and Monsieur Batignole

4 Legacy: Un héros très discret, Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars, Indigènes and Diplomatie

5 New generations: Un secret, Belle et Sébastien and Les Héritiers

Conclusion

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Figures

0.1 Jean Bachelet plaque, Boulevard du Saint-Michel, Paris (Author's photo)page

0.2 Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, Argos Films, 1959)

1.1 Lucie Aubrac (Claude Berri, CNC, 1997)

1.2 Bon Voyage (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France 2, 2003)

1.3 Les Femmes de l’ombre (Jean-Paul Salomé, Les Chauves-souris, 2008)

1.4 L’Armée du crime (Robert Guédiguian, Agat Films and CIE, 2009)

2.1 Les Misérables (Claude Lelouch, Les Films 13, 1995)

2.2 La Rafle (Roselyne Bosch, Légende Films, 2010)

2.3 Elle s’appelait Sarah (Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Hugo Productions, 2010)

3.1 Effroyables Jardins (Jean Becker, France 2, 2003)

3.2 Monsieur Batignole (Gérard Jugnot, Bac Films, 2002)

4.1 Un héros très discret (Jacques Audiard, Alicéléo, 1996)

4.2 Le Promeneur du Champ-de-Mars (Robert Guédiguian, Film Oblige, 2005)

4.3 Indigènes (Rachid Bouchareb, Tessalit Productions, 2006)

4.4 Diplomatie (Volker Schlöndorff, Gaumont, 2014)

5.1 Un secret (Claude Miller, France 3, 2007)

5.2 Les Héritiers (Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar, Loma Nasha Films/Vendredi Film, 2014)

6.1 François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in 1986 (Photo by Bart Molendijk, Netherlands National Archives. Wikimedia Commons/Bart Molendijk/Anefo, CC0 1.0)

Acknowledgements

My high school history teacher inspired me to value investigating the past and the ways in which we choose to tell its stories. Thank you, Mr Fairweather, for playing an important part in my ‘odyssey’. Many others joined me along the way and I would like to acknowledge them here.

My sincerest thanks to my mentor and friend Associate Professor Ben McCann for his kindness, generosity and ongoing support not only of this project but of me and my career more generally. I could not have done this without him. Thank you to Doctor Andrew McGregor and Associate Professor Michelle Royer for their valuable insights. Thanks also to Doctor Saige Walton for serving as a delightful colleague and role model in recent years.

I am grateful to have benefited from the teaching of the following esteemed educators who guided me at school, university and beyond: Kerry and Greg Elliott, Judy Taylor, Joh Hartog, Doctor Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, Doctor Colette Mrowa-Hopkins, Associate Professor Eric Bouvet, Professor John West-Sooby and Professor Natalie Edwards. I also wish to thank my supporters Rory, Nic, Alex, Peter, Katherine, Eddie, Clare, Aaron, Hayden, Steph, Simon, Michael, Laura, Trephina, Lesley and Joe, as well as my grandparents Ian and Marian.

Finally, I offer my eternal gratitude to the two people who everyday teach me the importance of compassion, honesty and courage – my mother Helen and my sister Annie – to whom this book is dedicated.

Note on translations

This book contains a range of material in languages other than English. French quotations within the text are accompanied by an English translation. For the most part, quotes have been translated from French to English by me. The English translation of French film dialogue is included, and the translation of dialogue from other languages has been taken from the official subtitles accompanying each film and included in English. I have used the original French film titles instead of international translations. The capitalisation of Resistance is applied when referring to operations under the banner of General de Gaulle's Free French Forces during the Second World War.

Introduction

During a trip to Paris in August 2016, I was walking along the Boulevard du Saint-Michel to the Panthéon and found myself facing a plaque commemorating a resistance fighter killed during the capital's Liberation. It read: ‘Ici, Jean Bachelet, 33 ans, F.F.I., est mort pour la France le 25 août 1944. Ses camarades de combat du 5e’ (Here, Jean Bachelet, 33 years old, F.F.I [Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur], died for France on 25 August 1944. His comrades-in-arms of the Fifth). That day marked the seventy-second anniversary of Bachelet's death and a fresh bouquet of flowers had been laid underneath. Here, I found a symbolic representation of the ongoing, often striking juxtaposition between past and present and the continuing legacy of ‘the dark years’, or les années noires, in France.

cintro-fig-0001.jpg

Figure 0.1

Jean Bachelet plaque, Boulevard du Saint-Michel, Paris

Since the final hours of the German Occupation (1940–44), French society has found it nigh on impossible to recount a coherent story of the events of the Second World War. As James Chisem (2011) stated, the ‘collective memory of WWII in France has been defined by the existence of competing and contested narratives’. Johnnie Gratton argued that the difficulties of this period rendered France even more incapable of confronting its collective past: ‘Until very recently, the Occupation years held only a small place, and a highly doctored one at that, in France's collective memory’ (2005: 39). In order to consolidate a sense of French national identity, a myth was established to reinforce France's reputation as a collective, unalloyed nation of resistance fighters. This myth was subsequently cemented in numerous French films representing the period. The key focus of this book is to discuss the function of historical films as acts of commemoration and explore how French films about the Second World War made between 1995 and 2015, following a speech delivered by newly elected President Jacques Chirac, shifted the way the Occupation was commemorated on French screens.

The significance of Chirac's speech

In 1995, after fourteen years of President François Mitterrand's socialist rule, France elected Jacques Chirac. Two months after assuming the presidency, Chirac delivered a speech at the fifty-third anniversary of the roundup of Vél’ d’Hiv (a mass arrest of Paris's Jewish population, organised and executed by France's Vichy regime on 16 July 1942). With this striking act of commemoration, Chirac, as head of the French state, accepted responsibility for the active role played by French authorities and thus acknowledged French complicity in the execution of the Holocaust. This act also marked the beginning of a new generation, since Mitterrand had repeatedly refused to offer an official apology.

This book does not suggest that cinematic representations made after 1995 were direct responses to Chirac's speech. The analysis of this recent period (from 1995 to 2015) will be thematic in nature and will allow us to better understand the central themes of new, relevant acts of commemoration aiming to remember an ever increasingly distant past. The election of Jacques Chirac from the PRP (Parti du Rassemblement pour la République), symbolised a political shift opening the door to important economic, social and cultural reforms. Chirac's speech, a generational shift in terms of French commemoration of the Second World War, occurred at the same time as a proliferation of official apologies all over the world, a trend that would continue throughout the 1990s. In Taking Wrongs Seriously (2006), Elazar Barkan and Alexander Karn argue that between 1991 and 2006, the human need to make up for past injustices expressed itself in the willingness of heads of state (and other authority figures) to apologise to victims of those past injustices. Chirac, as head of the French state and as an individual, expressed his regret for past actions. Chirac understood that the treatment of les années noires varied across the generations, stating in his Vél’ d’Hiv speech: ‘Les plus jeunes d’entre nous, j’en suis heureux, sont sensibles à tout ce qui se rapporte à la Shoah. Ils veulent savoir. Et avec eux, désormais, de plus en plus de Français décidés à regarder bien en face leur passé’ (Chirac 1995) (The youngest among us, I am encouraged to say, are sensitive to everything that relates to the Holocaust. They want to know more. And with them, there are increasing numbers of French people determined to face their past head on). As this work will demonstrate, in that moment Chirac incarnated a definitive break with the past and heralded a new kind of engagement with collective memory.

The historical and commemorative context, 1940 to 1994

Before we turn to the films and look more closely at how they reflect contemporary remembrance of the Occupation, we need to briefly summarise the well-known story of France during the Second World War. Paris was occupied by Adolf Hitler's Nazi forces on 14 June 1940. The government of the Third Republic was dissolved and Philippe Pétain became the new head of state as marshal. France accepted and venerated Pétain as a collaborating head of state due to his near mythic status as the ‘hero of Verdun’, a mantle earned through his military leadership and success during the First World War (Cohen 2011: 113). Two days after the fall of Paris, Pétain signed an armistice, accepting its harsh conditions. In a speech delivered and broadcast on 17 June, Pétain told the remaining groups throughout the country resisting German forces that the war must stop (Tint 1980: 92). It was at this point that the official defence of France ended. Thousands of soldiers became prisoners of war and France, now without an army, was under the complete control of a foreign power. As a consequence of the armistice, France was divided into two zones: an occupied zone to the north and a ‘free’ zone to the south, where the newly formed government found refuge in the spa town of Vichy. This French government, on which its location bestowed its name, had effectively lost its autonomy and was subject to an armistice which stipulated that the French administration, at every level, had to faithfully collaborate with the occupier. Pétain encouraged the French population to accept the German presence and surrender without conflict.

However, the day after Pétain's capitulation, another speech was broadcast conveying a very different message to the French population: to resist. Exiled in London, General Charles de Gaulle delivered his famous appel (or call) on 18 June 1940, thus establishing himself as the leader of the French Free Forces, a militarised Resistance movement operating outside of Vichy's domain and France's borders. This undercover military-like organisation existed next to more clandestine units of everyday resistance. Cohen, looking at examples set by other occupied nations, such as Belgium and Holland (where open defiance to German authority was more apparent), has argued that France did not do as much as it could to resist during the war (2011: 113). However, it is not easy to compare France with Vichy and France without Vichy. According to Maurice Larkin, Pétain and his prime minister, Pierre Laval, did in fact try to minimise the impact of the German Occupation on French society (1988: 102). Leah D. Hewitt has highlighted that ‘France's unique status as a resisting and collaborating nation in an official capacity, at war with itself in the guise of Free France (General Charles de Gaulle's government-in-exile in London) and Vichy (Petain's government in Vichy), made its situation, if not entirely distinct, at least an extreme version of what others went through in terms of internal battles’ (2008: 2). This French identity crisis thus led to a fragmented society and a Franco-Français conflict, but the lines that divided society into two groups (resistants and collaborators) were not so clear-cut.

The Franco-Français conflict meant that the Germans were not the only enemy to French resistance groups. Your identity was determined by the side with which you aligned yourself: resistance or collaboration. There was a great desire to be on the victorious side, which, at the start of the war, was certainly deemed to be that of the dominant Germans, who exercised complete control over France. The occupying forces held the power, which meant dissidents were always in danger. It is therefore an unavoidable fact, given the dynamics of the time, that there were French men and women who chose to align themselves with the Germans and the Vichy regime. The decisions made by the majority of French collaborators were determined by the nature of the war more generally, a war that brought fortune and opportunities to some. It must be said that the life of a passive (even active) collaborator, for the duration of the war, was much easier than that of a resistant. The choice to obey, to tolerate, to support and to even actively aid the occupying forces – choices many French people made freely – remains a troubling aspect of the war with which French society continues to grapple as it commemorates this crucial period in its history.

French society under the Occupation, however, was much more complex than a simple resistance/collaboration dichotomy would suggest. Outside this binary view, a great number of ordinary French citizens remained disengaged from the politics of the time. Larkin has suggested that people's behaviour depended on their individual circumstances, the introduction of laws that directly affected them (such as forced labour or economic reforms) and the changing fortunes of the German military (1988: 82). Lynne Taylor has cited ‘a spectrum of possible responses; those between active resistance and active collaboration and even those people uninvolved in the overt politics of the time’ (2000: 2). This indifference often manifested as attentisme; a term used to describe those who engaged in neither resistance nor collaboration but who instead tried to remain neutral and, as the term suggests, simply wait for the end of the war. This strategy of inaction was judged severely by proponents of the Gaullist myth, who sought above all to portray the entire French population as active resistance fighters throughout the Occupation.

The division between supporters of Vichy and those of resistance groups had to be abandoned after the war, both to save the personal dignity of a nation needing to reclaim its place at the winners’ table and to forge a stronger Europe, one in which France could play a significant role. After such a debilitating defeat, ‘it was crucial that the people of France believed that they had fought against the occupying forces in order to maintain their integrity’ (Fournier Lanzoni 2002: 267). At the end of the war, de Gaulle encouraged the French to believe they had ‘made the right choice’ (i.e. resist). In his famous speech in front of the Hôtel de Ville on the day of Paris's liberation on 25 August 1944, he established, as leader of the now victorious Free French Forces, the fundamental post-war Gaullist myth of universal French resistance.

Paris ! Paris outragé ! Paris brisé ! Paris martyrisé ! mais Paris libéré ! libéré par lui-même, libéré par son peuple avec le concours des armées de la France, avec l’appui et le concours de la France tout entière, de la France qui se bat, de la seule France, de la vraie France, de la France éternelle. (de Gaulle 1944)

(Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!)

Right from the onset, then, the fundamental narrative of the Occupation adopted a quasi-mythical status complete with battles between archetypal figures. As early as the day after the Liberation, historiography and commemorative ceremonies began to focus on those who fought against the German enemy (Bracher 2007b: 50). One hundred thousand people were killed serving the French resistance movement, and the heroism of these resistants became a source of inspiration for the demoralised French population. One of the key functions of this glorification was to consolidate values for a new France, one imbued with self-respect and dignity after a particularly humiliating military defeat. This was a vision which necessitated the marginalisation of the significant role the Allied forces played in French liberation. Chirac discussed the Gaullist dogma and mistruth in his memoirs, acknowledging that:

ce dogme avait eu sa raison d’être et sa nécessité au regard de l’œuvre nationale d’unification et de redressement engagée par le général de Gaulle au temps de la France libre et poursuivie après la Libération et jusqu’à son retour au pouvoir en 1958 (Chirac and Barré 2011: 69–70)

(this dogma was justified and was essential in the national narrative of unification and recovery engaged by General Charles de Gaulle at the time of free France and pursued after the Liberation until his return to power in 1958)

This post-war Gaullist vision (or, more specifically, the Gaullo-communist myth to recognise the contribution of the French Communist Party in Resistance efforts) was a vision that actively ‘minimised the divisions in French society that led to a kind of civil war’ (Bracher 2005: 114). According to Sheldon Kirschner (2014), de Gaulle, as the first president of the Fifth Republic, ‘sought to reshape the past so that the glories of the French resistance movement would drown out the ignominy of the Vichy era’. The resistant myth was thus born out of the necessity to unify France under the banner of an acceptable collective memory of the war.

When historians talk of the immediate post-war period (from the 1940s to the 1970s), they often make reference to the Gaullist myth, which describes France as a nation of resistants. The veneration of Resistance heroes can be seen in the work of L’Ordre de la Libération, which commemorated individuals chosen exclusively by de Gaulle after the war to pay tribute to their acts of resistance during the Occupation. The components of the cross of this order are steeped in Resistance mythology and symbolism: black representing grief, green representing hope, a dagger representing combat and the Cross of Lorraine symbolising Free France. These elements are accompanied by the motto of the order, written in Latin: ‘Patriam servando victoriam tulit’ (By serving the Fatherland, [they] achieve victory). The Cross of Lorraine is also found at the Mémorial de la France combattante at Mont-Valérien, just outside Paris, engraved with the following: ‘Quoi qu’il arrive, la flamme de la Résistance ne s’éteindra jamais – 18 juin 1940, Charles de Gaulle’ (Whatever happens, the flame of resistance will never be extinguished – 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle). The monument, with the cross at its centre, was inaugurated by de Gaulle in June 1960 and was ‘dedicated to all those who died for our freedom, to those who lie here, this site of memory where we pay our highest respect.’ The edifice is punctuated by sixteen bronze plaques, each symbolising a different aspect of the French combat during the Occupation and building an allegorical narrative, an epic saga in which the combat is never interrupted. The monument's crypt holds the remains of sixteen resistance fighters of the Second World War as well as an urn containing ashes collected from deportation camps. Each year, on 18 June, the French president attends a ceremony at this site with the chancellor of the Order of the Liberation in order to revitalise the flame of the resistance and to commemorate the sacrifices of past heroes. The mythical treatment of the Occupation's narrative continues to this day.

Coupled with the glorification of resistance was the severe condemnation of Vichy. In 1945 and 1946, justice following the Liberation was chaotic and ineffective. After the war, the margin between being a hero or a coward was not so clear and justice had to be served on those guilty of past crimes. This period, known as the épuration, or the Cleansing, was characterised by numerous arrests, trials and executions. The trials of Pétain and Laval held a particularly strong symbolic resonance in the quest to bring justice to the entire Vichy regime. During their respective trials, both men argued that they had acted in France's best interests. Larkin has cited the final reflections of both Pétain and Laval as they stood trial in July–August and October 1945, respectively. Pétain famously declared that ‘si je n’étais pas votre épée, j’essayais d’être votre bouclier’ (if I was not your sword, I tried to be your shield), while Laval suggested that he had tried to protect France as