What I Am Reading: "Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance" by Robert Gildea

This book gave itself a very clear mission: an inclusionary history of the French Resistance, with marginalized communities restored to their place. The execution was a bit of a slog, but the mission was accomplished in the end. In its opening, the book talks about how memoir-based history of the French resistance was eventually over the decades supplanted by documentation-based history, but that memoirs made a comeback when the marginalized were given space to tell their story. This book draws mainly on that storytelling.

After the Liberation of France in 1944, the Resistance was built up into a national myth. The main strain was the Gaullist myth, of a patriotic France that heroically liberated itself through military action. The Communists carried the torch of the alternative mythology: that the Liberation was a result of a popular uprising that was let down by the leadership. These myths have shifted considerably in the decades since the Liberation, and been supplanted by new narratives.

The first part of the book is essentially a sociological study, and this is where the book bogs down a bit. It spends several hundred pages recapping the careers of everyday resistance members, starting with what drove them to join the resistance (making up for their own military failures or family military failures, things like that). This is fine in theory, but in practice it means that the story resets itself every paragraph or page, and it can be difficult to follow the threads. However, a narrative does cohere between and within the mini-bios.

The French Resistance was, contrary to the Gaullist story, highly fragmented. There were many Communists and many on the anti-fascist left who wanted a violent struggle from day one, but they were handicapped by the fact that many other Communists followed the lead of Moscow in the Nazi-Soviet pact. The Communists were further kept at arm’s length by de Gaulle’s Free French government, and those who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain had been interned in camps prior to the start of the war by the French government. The Communists eventually came to conceive of the resistance as a popular uprising to defeat the Nazis and usher in a new era in France, but the Resistance did not resemble a popular uprising in the early years. Many support Marshal Petain as the legitimate ruler of France, and even those who wished to fight the Germans thought that he would be the man to eventually lead it. Some conservative Vichy supporters would come into the Resistance with little alteration of their ideological stance.

The Gaullists did not conceive of the Resistance as a popular uprising, but rather as measures taken by commandos and saboteurs in the pursuit of Allied war plans. De Gaulle needed an effective Resistance to maintain his own political capital: he was recognized and legitimized by the British government, but the Americans entertained thoughts of bringing the Vichy government into the war on their side. After the invasion of North Africa, many Vichy troops would defect, sometimes to the resentment of Resistance members who saw the same opportunists in charge on the ground.

Meanwhile, in Metropolitan France, there was a considerable difference in Resistance between the German-occupied northern areas and the Vichy south. The German occupation brought a focus on practical military tactics, whereas the resistance in Vichy was more politicized, and resembled more of a mass movement. This changed at the end of 1942, when the Germans invaded the Vichy territory. The comparative safe haven of the Italian occupied area was also eliminated the next year, when Italy dropped out of the war.

This is around the same time that de Gaulle sent Jean Moulin to organize the Resistance groups into a cohesive whole, made possible by Communist support. Moulin welded the disparate groups together for a short time, before his own arrest and death in 1943. After this, the Resistance took on more of an appearance of a mass movement, helped along by German conscription efforts that led to many young people taking to the hills to join the Maquis. When D-Day finally came, the Resistance efforts were chaotic. Many groups rose up prematurely, to the point that the Allies urgently tried to tamp things down, as they weren’t in a position to relieve many of the outgunned forces. To make a long story short, the French were eventually able to enter Paris (to relieve its own popular uprising), and de Gaulle proclaimed a new French government, though he disappointed many of the more radical resistance groups by retaining much of the old system.

This book goes to great lengths to tell the story of those who were initially ignored in the story of this glorious effort, and those who participated in different ways. The first Free French units to enter Paris was actually a detachment of Spanish Republicans, veterans of the fight against Fascism from years prior to France’s occupation. Many members of the Resistance were Jewish, both French Jews and Jewish immigrants from countries such as Poland that were occupied by the Nazis. Some had immigrated to France years prior, due to the country’s labor shortages; many of these were Communist Jews who were not welcome in the authoritarian successor states to the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Gildea gives credit to the women of the resistance, both those who saw combat and those who were relegated (by their own choice or not) to support roles. He is sure to point out which Resisters were gay.

Many of these stories only started to come to light a few decades ago, even as their youngest participants started to pass away. The first stage of the memorialization of the French Resistance was the patriotic Gaullist narrative that was propagated after the Liberation, alongside the Communist assertions of the mass movement. As the French political situation changed, the story changed as well – some Resisters abhorred the repressive tactics of the war in Algeria, but some viewed de Gaulle’s withdrawal as a betrayal of the spirit he fought for in the war. After de Gaulle left the scene at the end of the ‘60s, there were many attacks on his legacy. The Communists, too, faced attacks; their official story was too reflective of the Moscow party line, and downplayed the contributions of the international coterie of anti-fascist fighters under their banner. It did not help that the contemporary Communist leaders had laid low during the occupation. This is when the stories of Jewish resisters began to be told, as well as others who also fit less comfortably into the mold of Liberators of France: Spaniards, Poles, and even German and Italian anti-fascists. This is also when many historians started to posit that the majority of French citizens were not actually involved in the Resistance, and thus the country at large could not claim moral credit for it.

The narrative shifted again during the capture and trial of Klaus Barbie in the ‘80s. The French Resistance came to be viewed through the lens of the Holocaust, and more attention was given to the Righteous Among Nations who had sheltered Jews and otherwise resisted the Nazis ideologically. This led to the recognition of more women who had taken part in the Resistance. It also allowed some historians to restore credit to the French people as a whole, as it was thought that many small “acts of kindness” toward Jews made up the Resistance as well.

The book comes full circle, then. Even though it was not always tidy, by telling the stories of many individuals, some prominent and some humble, the true story of the French Resistance comes across: sometimes romantic, often horrific. It is good to set the Resistance in its historiographic context, because it matters whose story we tell, and why.

WHITHER PIERRE COT?

This book had the least Pierre Cot presence; however, Jean Moulin, the man tasked by de Gaulle with unifying the Resistance groups, was Cot’s Chief of Staff when he served as Air Minister (Cot himself fled to the United States during the war). This came back around in the revisionist era, when a historian tried to smear Moulin with Cot’s eventual support of the Soviet Union. This was strongly contested by other Resisters and historians of the Resistance.