The Specificities of Resistance Historiography: Realities and Representations

From 1944 until the beginning of the 1980s the idea prevailed that as a clandestine activity the resistance necessarily possessed few archives. Yet this was only partly the case, and the assumption persisted mainly because many archives were closed. There was also a widespread conviction that only a minority had been involved in clandestine activity: the general public knew, deep down, that the resistance had always been the preserve of a minority, a kind of elite.Footnote ¹² Everybody agreed that oral testimonies were therefore crucial. Indeed, two official committees were created in October 1944 and June 1945 in order to preserve the knowledge needed to write the future history of the resistance,Footnote ¹³ subsequently merging in 1951 to become the Committee on the History of the Second World War (Comité d’histoire de la deuxième guerre mondiale; CH2GM). Under the supervision of Édouard Perroy, professor of medieval history at the University of Lille and former resister, these two committees collected more than 2,000 testimonies from resisters, mostly between 1945 and 1947. As late as the 1980s and 1990s nobody studied the French resistance without using these sources and carrying out their own oral history. In the 1980s, for example, those of us studying a resistance movement, such as Alya Aglan, Olivier Wieviorka and myself, collected as many testimonies as we could.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet this period now belongs to the past. We have reached a turning point: the very last resisters are fast disappearing, with fewer than five Compagnons de la libération still alive in August 2018 (out of approximately 700 in 1945).Footnote ¹⁵

Another very particular influence on resistance historiography has been the axiom that only those who participated in the movement are suitably qualified to write about it: unlike other heroic moments of twentieth-century history, the resistance was a clandestine and elusive adventure intimately known only by its members. For at least thirty years the result of this axiom was that historians of the resistance tended to be former resisters. For many it was a crucial period in their lives: little wonder, therefore, that they should scrutinise everything published on the subject and react so strongly whenever they disagreed. This superposition – one might even say confusion – of actors and historians lasted a considerable length of time. Indeed, former resisters have continued to play a key role, with Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac being by far the best historian of Free FranceFootnote ¹⁶ and Daniel Cordier a major contributor to the knowledge of the resistance as viewed from the top (la Résistance des chefs) through his books on Jean Moulin, his boss for a year during the resistance itself.Footnote ¹⁷

For political and ideological reasons communists tried hard to make their presence felt in this historiographical field. Because of the Cold War they wanted their part in the resistance to be acknowledged and even magnified. Obsessed with the hazy period between 1939 and 1941 when the party apparatus linked to Moscow was not committed to outright resistance, they endeavoured – though failed – to control the history that was written.Footnote ¹⁸ In practice Gaullist memory gradually triumphed over its communist counterpart.Footnote ¹⁹

Yet even beyond this consideration the historiography of the resistance has retained a very particular and even precious status, linked to the assumption that it must be written only with the utmost care and respect. To be sure, many of the books appearing on the subject from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s were serious and reliable works of scholarship.Footnote ²⁰ Yet it is striking to notice that they remained on the methodological sidelines of the new approaches then dominant in the writing of History, not least with the success of the Annales school. In contrast, resistance historiography remained strongly positivist in approach.

An important change occurred at the very beginning of the 1980s, when a new laboratory was founded to replace the CH2GM that had controlled the field since the 1950s: The Institute of Contemporary History (Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent; IHTP). As the founder and director of this new laboratory, François Bédarida chose to insist on a theoretical reflection about the history of the present time. In particular, he emphasised that writing a history still in living memory could not be done without meditating on the difficulties that every historian would inevitably encounter on such a path.Footnote ²¹ Here he worked closely with one of the leading specialists on the French resistance, Jean-Pierre Azéma.Footnote ²² In parallel, a new generation of scholars was also taking to this historiographical field, which initiated a further substantial shift. Most of these scholars found a kind of logistical and intellectual shelter at the IHTP, which was an extremely welcoming, attractive and efficient research centre. This generation – the term is used here not to imply proximity in age but rather to denote a shared set of questions and approaches – worked on subjects such as public opinion, including representations and what is described as ‘the imaginary’ (‘l’imaginaire’, Pierre Laborie),Footnote ²³ the sociology of the resistance (Jacqueline Sainclivier),Footnote ²⁴ underground publications (François Marcot),Footnote ²⁵ foreigners in the French resistance and the role of the Parisian police (Denis Peschanski),Footnote ²⁶ resistance and daily life (Dominique Veillon),Footnote ²⁷ resistance seen from below (Jean-Marie Guillon),Footnote ²⁸ anthropological approaches to the French resistance (Rod Kedward)Footnote ²⁹ and resistance in a specific locality (e.g. John Sweets, who focused closely on Clermont-Ferrand).Footnote ³⁰ During the 1990s these historians organised a series of six conferences that deeply revisited the history of the French resistance.Footnote ³¹ These focused on three aspects: first, an attempt to give some elements of definition to what we call the resistance; second, the resistance as seen from below, a kind of ‘résistance au village’;Footnote ³² and third, a comparison with other resistances in European countries. What gradually emerged was a history that was both more conceptual and more complex.

At the same time these specialists in the history of the French resistance in France also became increasingly independent from the IHTP. Though the writing of this history continued to advance, it also fragmented – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the evolution of the discipline as a whole. The results of this movement of renewal culminated in 2006 with the Dictionnaire de la Résistance.Footnote ³³

I would like at this point to emphasise some of the most promising new directions taken in recent years. These original approaches have often been the hallmark of young scholars supervised by a number of top-rank academic historians. The time when the whole field of resistance historiography was encompassed by a single institution – whether the CH2GM under the direction of Henri Michel between 1951 and 1980, or more recently the IHTP – has clearly passed, and research is now more closely dependent on the personal interests and curiosity of the individual scholar. In this sense the ‘third generation’ of resistance scholars seems to be more open minded and freer than their predecessors (including myself). Partly this can be traced to a decline in the deep-rooted centralisation for which France is so well known, partly to a dramatic change in the questions posed to the past by the present.

New Directions

I do not intend to be comprehensive. Instead, I wish to offer a few insights into the latest historiographical trends, moving from more obvious points towards recent evolutions that are not always so easy to see or grasp. It is striking, indeed, how far some of the lacunae that I noted in an historiographical essay published in 2005Footnote ³⁴ have since been studied – such as relations with the Allies, the part played by the Giraudists,Footnote ³⁵ the secret services (the Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action, which depended on de Gaulle’s administration in London and Algiers), the actual role of women in the underground conflict and so on.

In the last twenty years significant archives have become available, such as those of the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Operations (Bureau Central de Renseignement et d’Action; BCRA) and of the Special Operations Executive. Previously, these archives had been either closed or subject to restricted access. The result of such restrictions had been the writing of a kind of authorised history (such as by M.R.D. Foot,Footnote ³⁶ Colonel Passy,Footnote ³⁷ Charles de GaulleFootnote ³⁸ and to some extent Daniel Cordier, who wrote mainly from the archives he kept at home).Footnote ³⁹ Other scholars had to rely on a small selection of published archival extracts, while the archives themselves were carefully preserved from prying eyes.

Changes in accessibility have, however, enabled important shifts in interpretation. In the case of the BCRA Sebastien Albertelli took advantage of the fact that its archives had opened to describe precisely how the service had been organised.Footnote ⁴⁰ He showed in particular its political dimension, which was an essential aspect of its activity. Albertelli was harshly criticised during his PhD viva by actors who had been in close and permanent contact with the BCRA, not least Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Daniel Cordier and Stéphane Hessel. Their criticisms reveal some of the constant tensions between memory and history – even though men like Crémieux-Brilhac and Cordier had themselves written academically rigorous historical studies. Albertelli’s thesis was equally significant on another level. It proved that there were no complete and exhaustive archives of the BCRA, suggesting in turn that written archives are not – and never will be – sufficient to grasp the reality of the past, even when this past is very recent. We should remain aware of the fact that secret services, wherever and whenever they act, do not care to give all the details of their actions: this would reveal too much of who they are, and of how they might react in a given context. As if by accident, files are often lost, irretrievably damaged by fire or water, etc. Every researcher works on partial archives, which should remind us of the danger of developing any kind of cult of the written archives as revealing reality or so-called truth. This is one of the reasons why oral sources can so often be useful and enlightening.

In recent years resistance historiography has also encompassed new approaches to archives that were already more or less accessible. This is the case for all research concerning repression, the most extensively studied aspect of the period in the last ten years. Understanding the resistance requires a concomitant knowledge of its enemies, their methods and the extent of their powers. In this research area great advances have been made. Gaël Eismann, for instance, has studied the part played by the German Military Commanders in France (Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich) located at the Majestic Hotel in Paris in the global strategy to maintain order and security in occupied France.Footnote ⁴¹ In particular, she re-evaluated the degree of violence employed by the Wehrmacht in France, which dramatically increased as the war progressed. Gaël Eismann’s book points out that the Wehrmacht was not the kind and ‘correct’ army so often described:Footnote ⁴² instead, it was numerous and efficient, and similarly far removed from Robert Paxton’s image of 40,000 men, mostly elderly and silver-haired, as given in Vichy France.Footnote ⁴³ With a similar perspective, other recent research has explored the repression of the resistance, with Cédric Neveu studying the Moselle,Footnote ⁴⁴ Laurent Thiery the Nord Pas-de-Calais,Footnote ⁴⁵ Thomas Fontaine the security services (Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheintsdienst; SIPO-SD) in the occupied and non-occupied zonesFootnote ⁴⁶ and Emmanuel Chevet examining the action led by the gendarmerie in France.Footnote ⁴⁷ These studies have made vital progress on three levels. First, they go beyond long-standing clichés to reveal the great variety of repressive forces (united by a lowest common denominator of anti-communism). Secondly, they often stress the significance of the ways in which the enemy was represented on both sides. Everyone fought in accordance with the image held of the enemy, and if this was true for the Wehrmacht and the SIPO-SD (or Gestapo), it was equally true for French police, Milice or gendarmerie. Third, these studies also reveal wide local variation across France, with repression particularly harsh in the forbidden zone, tough in the occupied zone and more moderate (at least until 1943) in Moselle, which the Nazis regarded as German territory. Moreover, these very different situations also diverged from what was happening in the non-occupied zone, and a supplementary distinction must be drawn between German behaviour and its Italian counterpart.

Although the French did not suffer as much as other occupied nations such as Poland or Yugoslavia, these studies prove that the French resistance had to learn gradually to cope with a great deal of violence, and a high level of brutality. When we think about repression, we need to draw not only on statistics (an important resource and one that has become more accurate in recent years), but we also need to consider the ways the repression worked, since this affected and shaped the modus operandi of the resistance. Studying repression in all these dimensions, we come closer to understanding that death was constantly on the mind of each resister, daily and insistently. Hence the intensity of underground life, which – both at the time but equally in the memory of its survivors – was unlike anything else. Something unheard of, ‘almost a dream’ (presque un songe), as Jean Cassou wrote in 1953.Footnote ⁴⁸

New approaches are linked, as we all know, to the interrogations that occupy our minds in the present time. We always interrogate the past from our position in the present, which in turn raises important questions.Footnote ⁴⁹

This is, for example, the case with gender studies. Although regularly celebrated, the part played by women in the resistance was not clearly established before the 1970s and 1980s, at the very moment at which the Women’s Liberation movement was becoming both visible and influential. In the 1980s and 1990s Hanna Diamond, Paula Schwartz, Dominique Veillon and Danièle Voldman started working in this particular field.Footnote ⁵⁰ Since then the question of women’s participation in the resistance has remained open but has often proved challenging to address – as Claire Andrieu made only too clear in an important article for Le Mouvement Social.Footnote ⁵¹ In a thesis devoted to the north of France, Catherine Lacour-Astol has helped to consider the question in new ways.Footnote ⁵² She points out that although women’s resistance was very efficient it can be difficult to uncover not only because it was often restricted to the domestic and private sphere of home, but also because it was determined by the ways in which authorities in charge of repression considered women. Nevertheless, research such as that of Catherine Lacour-Astol has shed light on this otherwise ‘invisible’ resistance.

Another novel topic has been treated by Johanna Barasz,Footnote ⁵³ who questioned the vichysto-resistants, a concept formulated by historians in the 1990s to describe those who were simultaneously resisters and supporters of the Vichy regime. For many years the topic was taboo, given that the resistance was celebrated while Vichy was both hated and condemned. But gradually it became possible, and not necessarily irrelevant, to pose this question. Studying American, British, French and German archives, Johanna Barasz makes it very clear that some resisters, and not necessarily the most insignificant, both admired Pétain as a person and supported his policies. Yet – as she demonstrates – this situation of ambivalence could not persist beyond a certain limit. If these women and men (Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, General Gabriel Cochet, Henri Frenay, François Mitterrand, etc.) wanted to be part of the resistance, they had at some point to give up on Vichy. The decision they made was not immediate and not always as clear as we might wish to find it in retrospect. Barasz shows that there were what she calls ‘métamorphoses’. Her approach is thought provoking in so far as it teaches us that what we might afterwards call the resistance was in fact a long and uncertain process during which people and situations changed dramatically. Her thesis underlines the importance of a feeling that Pierre Laborie studied for a long time: ‘ambivalence’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ambivalence is not synonymous with ambiguity, nor with duplicity. Taken from Freud, ambivalence is the observation that one may at the very same moment experience two totally contradictory feelings: we must resist, and we must support Pétain and the National Revolution. Ambivalence is not a permanent feeling but it does and did exist, and Barasz convincingly traces how it evolved month by month. Last but not least she reveals that Allies were often reluctant to take internal resistance seriously (since France had been overwhelmed, beaten, humiliated and was no longer a participant in the war) and experienced still greater difficulty in understanding what was actually happening in France. While the British had a fairly accurate measure of the situation early on in the war, the Americans persistently failed to achieve this – which explains their extended support for vichysto-resistants, even when the influence of this group had become virtually non-existent.

A further new direction to emerge in recent years could be qualified as conceptual, anthropological and empirical. This approach attributes great importance to the experience of resisters. It is not entirely novel: Rod Kedward initiated this type of study in the 1970s. What is new is that the approach now appears to be what economists would call a trend. Conceptual approaches can, for instance, be illustrated by Cécile Vast’s thesis on the nature of the resistance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Based on sophisticated lexicological methods, her study, which focuses mainly on the resistance in the southern zone of France, insists on the deep changes that the identity of the resistance underwent between 1940 and 1944. She reveals in particular that the notion and feeling of identity did not have anywhere near the same meaning at different levels in the resistance. Her study shatters some stereotypes, especially that of an atemporal identity continuing unchanged through the dark years. Such research is characteristic of new approaches in its degree of emphasis on close textual analysis (and indeed several clandestine texts have been published in recent years with helpful critical apparatuses).

Very different is the approach adopted by two theses defended in 2008 by Sylvain Gregori (on the resistance in Corsica)Footnote ⁵⁶ and Julien Blanc (on the réseau du Musée de l’Homme). Both of these studies are clearly anthropological. Sylvain Gregori’s thesis (still unpublished) goes beyond the facts and chronology in order to understand how the resistance could find its way forward in a very peculiar society, marked by close ties and close adversities between people and families who knew each other intimately. He also deals with a complex issue: how did the Corsican people, who had been Italian for centuries, deal with Italian occupation? Julien Blanc worked on a very different field, focusing on the beginnings of the resistance in the occupied zone.Footnote ⁵⁷ Twenty or thirty years ago Julien Blanc would probably have taken the well organised archives of Germaine Tillion as a treasure, and as somehow unquestionable. He would have written a classical history of a resistance movement, something like the book published by Martin Blumenson on the Musée de l’Homme network.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet his approach was strikingly different. First, he met Germaine Tillion regularly for years and listened carefully to what she told him: she was a prominent ethnologist, and she had always thought about classifications such as those she had formulated in the 1930s when studying the populations in the Algerian Massif of Aurès. She was then on the ground, living with the Chouai people, three days away by horse from the nearest small town. Second, Julien Blanc remained on the alert: he started exploring the archives and his perception evolved gradually. His hypotheses changed, and his thesis took him almost ten years to complete, whereas he was expected to finish in five. Some historians – among them Rod Kedward – found his thesis extremely empirical, which was true. But that is what makes his study so special and thought provoking. Julien Blanc has a solid academic trajectory, yet he did his best to forget this entirely and to immerse himself in and discover the world he wanted to explore. This behaviour breaks with what Pierre Bourdieu described as the habitus,Footnote ⁵⁹ behaviour so deeply rooted that we do not even notice it, and indeed even often ignore the fact that we are doing exactly what is expected from us. Instead of a well organised garden, with neat lines and a carefully mown lawn, Julien Blanc reveals what he calls ‘a nebula’ (une nébuleuse). In order to understand this nebula he studies the currents of opinion in northern France in 1940–1. And what he describes does not look like anything we have ever read.

Blanc’s study can be situated in a wider domain of interest to many current researchers: the relationship between the resistance and its social background. He demonstrates that far beyond the so-called ‘réseau du Musée de l’Homme’, a wide network was built very quickly, as quickly as it then disappeared in the wake of its repression. But his originality is to reveal the extent to which even repression could not expunge all the actors of that previous nebula: some of those who escaped the German repression continued to act in other groups with other responsibilities, and they were then stronger because they had experienced the lack of professionalism in their former organisation. Therefore, it is no longer the French resistance as an entity that is being studied but rather French resisters more broadly, and not necessarily the most well known or famous among them.

Julien Blanc also insists on an aspect that has been ignored or underestimated: the lacunae in our documentation and the silences of these resisters – not only, of course, of those who died in the combat (like Boris Vidé and Anatole Levitsky, leaders of one branch of the network) but also of those who survived and remained silent until their deaths. Silence is indeed part of this story and must be taken into account. Many pieces of the puzzle are lacking. And the puzzle, as it is later pieced together, is a construction that owes much to the reconstructions of memory and to the pressures of the post-war administration, which needed clear answers to the question of who deserved what. There is a gap between the reality known and lived by the resisters and what appears when the reconstruction is complete. Nobody can fill this void, which is consubstantial with the reality being studied. But historians can and must try to do so. As Albert Camus wrote, ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy’.Footnote ⁶⁰

There is a wonderful study to be written on the silence and the silences of resisters.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, this became obvious to me when I met Jean-Pierre Vernant, a resister and an anthropologist of Ancient Greece. We met initially because he had been an important member of Libération-Sud. He received me in his office at the Collège de France, where he was a professor, and I continued to meet up with him many times in the years that followed. Though always very kind and eager to help, he was never very talkative about his own experiences. He tended to reason in general and very interesting terms, but he would not speak about his personal feelings. I read his articles and books, and I realised that he had never written about the resistance. Yet I could see that his personal experience was below the surface of some of his writings. He published, for example, an article about ‘the beautiful death’ (La belle mort) in Ancient Greece, dealing ostensibly with Homer and with Greek mythology.Footnote ⁶² Yet to a scholar who was studying the resistance this piece also appeared as a reflection on the death of his friends. At a seminar we held at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Pierre Laborie and I asked Vernant to speak about his experiences as a resister. Then ninety years old, he agreed to examine the link between his academic research and his experience of the resistance. This link, it turned out, was powerful indeed.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, the silence Vernant maintained until his ‘coming out’ was not exceptional: many resisters did not speak in this capacity and kept for themselves what belonged to a kind of intimacy.Footnote ⁶⁴ To understand these silences more fully one would also need to delve into the importance of family, the notion of solidarity and the implicit bonds woven when there is so much at stake.

This leads me to the very last contemporary approach I would like to emphasise: the field of resistance memory. Pierre Laborie wrote a leading book on the subject entitled The Sorrow and the Poison (Le chagrin et le venin): an implicit reference to Marcel Ophuls’s famous film The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la pitié), made in 1969 and released in 1971.Footnote ⁶⁵ Ophuls’s film revealed that France under the occupation had not been as brave as it would have wished to appear, proving his point with a series of small cowardly acts on the part of the French. He made it very clear that the so-called ‘dark years’ had in fact been presented through rose-tinted spectacles. In 1973 the translation into French of Vichy France by Robert Paxton went further and deeper by demonstrating that the Vichy Regime was fully accountable for the policies it implemented. Since then a darker view of French behaviour during the Second World War became what Pierre Laborie described in his book as a ‘vulgate’, and his aim was to scrutinise the genealogy of this view. According to Laborie, the reality was far more complex than the image so often presented today, with 100,000 resisters, 100,000 collaborators and nearly 40 million people living in stubborn and cautious ‘politics of patience’ (attentisme). Bringing together a conceptual framework with his own knowledge of the resistance, Laborie calls for a vision of the period that takes ambivalence into account. He asserts that French people experienced both ‘double thinking’ and ‘double lives’ on an everyday basis. He is convincing when he invites us to be aware of the fact that a minority is not necessarily marginal, not necessarily a dissident minority. His opponents argue that he rehabilitates an old-fashioned view of the resistance. It is a clever attack, but I am not sure it refutes his demonstration.

Laborie’s book stresses the fact that the historiography of the resistance in France has always been an ideological battlefield. For me, the changes I have highlighted in this article were encapsulated in an experience of May 1997 when, on the initiative of the local edition of the newspaper Libération, a meeting was organised to address the accusation of treason levelled against Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, following a plea written by Klaus Barbie and his lawyer. The historians present (Jean-Pierre Azéma, François Bédarida, Daniel Cordier, Henry Rousso, Dominique Veillon and I) declared that Lucie and Raymond Aubrac were not traitors. But, at the same time, for the entire day, most of these historians kept asking the same questions and wondered why they could not receive proper answers. The symbolic killing that the meeting involved was not of course well received, either by the Aubracs or by Maurice Agulhon, Jean-Pierre Vernant and myself, who were also part of this dark day. Ultimately the Libération meeting proved an embarrassment for everybody, including the attending historians, who were criticised by many of their colleagues. Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, the intention of the meeting was less to clarify points that had remained unclear for decades than to signify that history, as a discipline, should get rid of the actors. Though some of the attending actors persist in thinking that only the method was culpable,Footnote ⁶⁶ it seems to me that it was a profound mistake.Footnote ⁶⁷ In crossing the line in such a violent manner, historians transgressed the boundaries of their role. Marc Bloch assigned to historians the task of understanding, not judging.Footnote ⁶⁸

In fact, this painful and pointless meeting at Libération reveals the extent to which the resistance remains a sensitive issue. Debates continue among historians working on the occupation. Some argue that a pious legend prevents us from scrutinising the resistance without prejudice or fear. The truth is that the resistance does not require a myth of spotless heroism and purity. Indeed, ignoring its weaknesses and failings, as if it needed to be protected from proper historical scrutiny, lessens its achievement.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, this statement must not lead us to ignore the strangeness and complexity of a very peculiar history that, in a landscape of mediocrity, took a path that is far from easy to grasp, or to understand.