Building a Clandestine State
Part V Liberation and After
Introduction
22 Towards Liberation: January to June 1944
The Milice State: Darnand and Henriot
Glières: ‘Defeat of arms, victory of souls’
Springtime of Fear
April 1944: Pétain in Paris
The Communists
What Kind of Insurrection?
23 Liberations
Uprisings and Massacres
COMAC v London
Micro-Histories
De Gaulle in Bayeux
The Last Days of Vichy
Liberation and Insurrection
The Liberation of Paris
Vichy-Sigmaringen: From One Spa to Another
24 A New France?
Restoring order
The Purges I: Myth and Reality
The Purges II: Cleansing the Community
The Purges III: The Trials
Intellectuals in the Dock
The Liberation Betrayed?
Epilogue Remembering the Occupation
Constructing Memory
Dissenting Memories I: The Resistance
Dissenting Memories II: Pétainists and Collaborators
Buried Memories: The Victims
Fragmented Memories
Memory on Trial
Obsessive Memory
Mitterrand’s Memories
The Papon Trial
The Resistance Syndrome
In Search of the True France
Appendix: The Camps of Vichy France
Bibliographical Essay
Index
List of Maps and Figure
Maps
1 French départements
2 Occupied France
3 The Camps of Vichy France
Figure
1 The organization of the Resistance and the Free French at the end of 1943
Abbreviations
The numbers in brackets refer to the page in the text where it first appears with an English translation or explanation.
ACA
Assemblée des cardinales et archevêques [268]
ACJF
Association catholique de la jeunesse française [270]
ADMP
Association pour défendre la mémoire du Maréchal Pétain [609]
AI
Action immédiate [502]
AMGOT
Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories [527]
ANAPF
Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population Française [31]
ANOD
Association nationale pour l’organisation de la démocratie [51]
AO
Action ouvrière [411]
AS
Armée secrète [436]
ATP
Arts et traditions populaires [30]
BCRA
Bureau central de renseignements et d’action [432]
BCRAM
Bureau central de renseignements et d’action militaire [400]
BIP
Bureau d’information et de presse [431]
BS
Brigades spéciales [158]
CAD
Centre d’action et de documentation [200]
CAS
Comité d’action socialiste [119]
CCDM
Comité central des mouvements de Résistance [465]
CDJC
Centre de documentation juive contemporaine [14]
CDL
Comité départemental de Libération [518]
CDLL
Ceux de la Libération [413]
CDLR
Ceux de la Résistance [413]
CEES
Comité d’études éonomiques et sociales [297]
CF
Croix de feu [72]
CFA
Comité franco-allemand [88]
CFL
Corps franc de la Libération [540]
CFLN
Comité français de la Libération nationale [459]
CFTC
Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens [270]
CGE
Comité général d’études [431]
CGQ J
Commissariat général aux questions juives [357]
CGT
Confédération générale du travail [46]
CGTU
Confédération générale du travail unitaire [66]
CIMADE
Comité intermouvement auprès des évacués [377]
CLL
Comité local de Libération [538]
CMN
Comité national militaire (of FTP) [423]
CMR
Comité médical de la Résistance [199]
CND
Confrérie Notre Dame [400]
CNE
Comité national des écrivains [499]
CNIE
Commission nationale interprofessionnelle d’épuration [590]
CNR
Conseil national de la Résistance [456]
CNU
Comité national de l’urbanisme [348]
CO
Comité d’organisation [162]
COIC
Comité d’organisation du cinéma [318]
COMAC
Commission d’action militaire [521]
COSI
Comité ouvrier de secours immédiat [297]
CPL
Comité parisien de Libération [519]
CRI
Commissariat technique à la reconstruction immobilière [317]
CRIF
Conseil représentatif des Israélites de France [613]
CRS
Compagnie republicaine de securité [260]
CSAR
Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire [77]
CSC
Comité syndical de coordination [296]
CSEIC
Conseil supérieur de l’économie industrielle et commerciale [163]
CSP
Centre syndical du propagande [197]
CVR
Combattant volontaire de la Résistance [477]
DGEN
Délégation général à l’équipement national [162]
DGREFA
Délégation générale aux relations économiques franco-allemandes [186]
DGSS
Direction générale des services spéciales [461]
DMN
Délégué militaire national [521]
DMR
Délégué militaire de région [520]
DMZ
Délegué militaire de zone [520]
EMFFI
État-Major des forces françaises de l’intérieur [547]
EIF
Éclaireurs israélites de France [160]
ENA
ERC
Emergency Rescue Committee [300]
FFI
Forces françaises de l’intérieur [505]
FN
Front national [444]
FNC
Fédération nationale catholique [68]
FNSP
Fondation nationale des sciences politiques (11)
FRN
Front national révolutionnaire [220]
FST
Front social du travail [197]
FTP
Franc-Tireurs et partisans [368]
GMR
Groupes mobiles de réserve [260]
GPRF
Gouvernement provisoire de la République française [543]
GTE
Groupement de travailleurs étrangers [150]
IEQ J
Institut d’études des questions juives [200]
IEQJER
Institut d’étude des questions juives et ethno-raciales [358]
IHTP
Institut d’histoire du temps présent [7]
INED
Institut national d’études démographiqu
es [597]
JEC
Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne [414]
JFOM
Jeunesse de France et d’Outremer [160]
LVF
Légion de volontaires français [194]
MBF
Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich [470]
MLN
Mouvement de Libération nationale [170]
MNCR
Mouvement national contre le racisme [369]
MNRPDG
Mouvement national de résistance des prisonniers de guerre [514]
MOI
Main d’oeuvre immigrée [365]
MRP
Mouvement républicain populaire [511]
MSR
Mouvement social révolutionnaire [192]
MUR
Mouvements unis de la Résistance [496]
NAP
Noyautage des administrations publiques [411]
NRF
Nouvelle revue française [38]
OCM
Organisation civile et militaire [413]
OCPRI
Office central de répartition des produits industriels [162]
OFI
Office central d’information [253]
OG
Operational Group [548]
OJC
Organisation juive de combat [368]
ORA
Organisation de Résistance de l’armée [505]
OS
Organisation spéciale [423]
OSE
Oeuvre de secours aux enfants [370]
OSS
Office of Strategic Services [408]
PCF
Parti communiste français [66]
PPF
Parti populaire français [78]
PQJ
Police aux questions juives [260]
PDP
Parti démocrate populaire [70]
PKWN
Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego [494]
PNB
POWN
Polska organizacja walki o niepodlogosc [494]
PSF
Parti social français [74]
RNP
Rassemblement national populaire [193]
RPF
Rassemblement du peuple français [603]
SAP
Section d’atterrisage et de parachutage [548]
SAS
Special Air Services [548]
SCAP
Service du contrôle des administrateurs provisoires [356]
SD
Sicherheitsdienst [170]
SEC
Service d’enquête et de contrôle [260]
SFIO
Section française de l’internationale ouvrière [197]
SGJ
Secrétariat général à la jeunesse [149]
SNM
Service national du maquis [453]
SOAM
Service des opérations aériennes et maritimes [435]
SOE
Special Operations Executive [400]
SOL
Service d’ordre légionnaire [230]
SPAC
Service de police anticommuniste [260]
SRMAN
Service de répression des menées antinationales [261]
SSS
Service des sociétés secrètes [260]
STO
Service du travail obligatoire [228]
TA
Travail allemand [494]
UDSR
Union démocratique et sociale de la Résistance [594]
UFF
Union des femmes françaises [508]
UGIF
Union générale des Israélites de France [357]
UNE
Union nacional española [495]
UNR
Union nationale de la Résistance [470]
UNSA
Union nationale des syndicats agricoles (290)
WT
Wireless Transmission [435]
Abbreviations used in footnotes
EHQ
European History Quarterly
FHS
French Historical Studies
GMCC
Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains
HJ
Historical Journal
JCH
Journal of Contemporary History
JMH
Journal of Modern History
MS
Mouvement social
RHDGM
Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale
RHMC
Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine
VEF
J-P. Azéma and F. Bédarida, Le Régime de Vichy et les Français (1993)
VSRH
Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire
Map 1 French départements
Map 2 Occupied France
Introduction: Historians and the Occupation
In France, the period between 1940 and 1944 is known as the ‘Dark Years’. The prosecutor at the post-war trial of Marshal Pétain, André Mornet, entitled his memoirs ‘Four Years to Erase from our History’.1 There was a lot to erase. In 1940, after a battle lasting only six weeks, France suffered a catastrophic military defeat. An armistice was signed with Germany, and half of France, including Paris, was occupied by German troops. In the other half, a supposedly independent French government, headed by Marshal Pétain, installed itself in the spa town of Vichy. The Vichy government liquidated France’s democratic institutions, persecuted Freemasons, Jews, and Communists, and embarked on a policy of collaboration with Germany. Eventually 650,000 civilian French workers were compulsorily drafted to work in German factories; 75,000 Jews from France perished in Auschwitz; 30,000 French civilians were shot as hostages or members of the Resistance; another 60,000 were deported to German concentration camps.
André Mornet’s desire to erase these years from history was widely shared. De Gaulle tried to do the same. In August 1944, his provisional government issued an ordinance declaring that all Vichy’s legislation was null and void: history would resume where it had stopped in 1940. When de Gaulle was asked in liberated Paris to announce the restoration of the French Republic, he refused—on the grounds that it had never ceased to exist. This legal fiction became the foundation of a heroic reinterpretation of the Dark Years. According to this reinterpretation, most of the horrors inflicted on France had been the work of the Germans alone; de Gaulle and the Resistance had incarnated the real France; and the mass of the French people, apart from a handful of traitors, had been solidly behind them, whether in thought or in deed. Even Mornet contradicted the title to his own memoirs, by stating in the epigraph that the Resistance had made the period between 1940 and 1944 ‘years to inscribe in our history’. This Resistance myth reached its apogee in the 1960s when de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic. In 1964, the remains of Jean Moulin, who had been de Gaulle’s envoy to the Resistance, were transferred to the Panthéon where France’s national heroes are buried.
The heroic myth ignored too many inconvenient realities to survive for ever—during the Occupation Mornet himself offered his legal services to the prosecution at the Riom trial where Vichy had put its political enemies in the dock—and it started to crumble in the 1970s. A catalyst in this process was Marcel Ophuls’s documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity. Arguably one of the most important historical documentaries ever made, Ophuls’s three-hour film, released in 1971, was a craftily constructed work which presented the French population during the Occupation in an unprecedentedly unfavourable light, depicting them as predominantly selfish and attentiste. Ophuls delighted in capturing on screen people’s attempts to rewrite their past. The film had been made for television, but it was so iconoclastic that the authorities refused to broadcast it, and it was not televised in France until 1981. The Sorrow and the Pity was part of the 1968 mood of youth rebellion: de Gaulle was president, and it was his version of the past that
was being challenged. A second film with a great impact was Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974), the story of an adolescent peasant boy who becomes a collaborator by chance not conviction. Returning on his bicycle from an attempt to join the Resistance, he has a puncture, stumbles upon some Germans, and ends up working for them instead. The film depicts an amoral world without heroes where destiny is arbitrary.2