France views the Resistance with fresh eyes


By Henry Samuel in Paris

Last Updated: 12:29am GMT 19/02/2008





France is undergoing a major shift in the perception of the country's wartime collaboration with the Nazis, marked by a new television film focusing on the unsung heroes of the Resistance.
Historians say that after a period of overblown pride in wartime resistance, the French had swung in recent decades to a national sense of guilt over the country's submission to its German occupiers.
The docu-drama, La Résistance, shown on French television, focuses on little known, often small-scale acts of resistance during four years of Nazi occupation.

Pierre Laborie, a historian, said the film clarified the fact that "an enormous number of people refused to give in (to collaborating)".
Mr Laborie, who wrote France under Vichy and the Occupation, said it would help fight against the prevailing view of a "cowardly and limp" France. That view was "a cliché that I hear all the time, and very rooted in the thirty-something generation".
"Even when the Germans were flying from victory to victory, the very great majority (of French) did not consent to the politics of collaboration," he told Le Parisien.
The first part of the film focuses primarily on lesser known examples of revolt, such as a 16-year-old jailed for cutting telephone wires, a child sticking his tongue out at a German seconds before being executed or miners risking death by going on strike.
The second episode concentrates on those who hid Jews or chose not to denounce their neighbours.
French resistance groups fought the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, from July 1940 to August 1944.
Most historians until now have put the number of those involved at a few hundred thousand.
But Mark Pottier, a historian at the Caen war memorial, said official figures about the Resistance did not give the full picture.
"Today it's no longer black and white. Certainly there were collaborators, but many Resistance members in everyday life fought back often with small gestures," he said.
"It's easy to cast the first stone, but everyone should ask himself what would I have done or been capable of doing?"
The film, directed by Christophe Nick, was released amid a row sparked by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he wanted all 10-year-old schoolchildren to "adopt" one of the 11,000 Jewish children from France killed in the Holocaust and learn all about them.
"We must tell a child the truth," he said last week. "It is ignorance that prompts the repetition of abominable situations, not knowledge. Make our children into children with open eyes."
However, many psychologists, teachers and parents were outraged, saying that 10-year-olds did not have the emotional maturity to cope.
Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi hunter who has done more than anyone to identify and honour deported French Jews, cautiously welcomed the plan, but Simone Veil, a former health minister and herself an Auschwitz survivor, described it as "blood-chilling".
Faced with such criticism, Xavier Darcos, the education minister, sought to defuse the row yesterday by suggesting that it could be adapted to honouring one child per class.



France views the Resistance with fresh eyes - Telegraph

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman

"Today it's no longer black and white. Certainly there were collaborators, but many Resistance members in everyday life fought back often with small gestures,"


I saw it on Tv and liked it , it was a good quality fiction with some great historical documents, but no surprise here. There were no major changes in the approach if you ask me. The role of the French police has once more been minmalized, even though you could see sequences with cops guarding camps which I assure you don't see often.
There were 200.000 active resistants, 200.000 active collaborators, the others were passive. When you see the documentary you would thing many more would be ready to risk their lives, which was not always true. There were some great heroes but their actions are drowned in the daily actions of the average civilian. This was true for some, but then why did nobody mention the denunciation letters to the Gestapo , the neigbours who showed the police where jews were hidden? Yes the large majority of French jews were saved by great people, but the fact of pointing out that some other bastards collaborated makes the Resistance even greater. This point is not made if you ask me. The resistance is depicted as bunch of idealists who love freedom and are anti racists. This was not true: many were Communists and hated De Gaulle, other adored him , when they mentionned native troops many used racists terms: many just hated the Germans even more.

The main message got through although it was abit too politically correc tin my opinion. There were also some historical mistakes I saw the city of Orleans which was showed after the 1944 bombings whereas this area was devastated in 1940. That doesn't matter.

1)100.000 resisitants died (kia, mia, torture, deportation , illness etc...) Draw the parallel witht he Battle of France = 100.000 French casualties
2)more french resistants were deported than Jews (80.000 vs 75.000)
3)for every allied soldier saved 10 resistants would die (average) if one single got busted
4) in 1942 there was an anti nazi bombing every day
5) in 1943-44 there was one every hour. (Draw a parallel with the middle and imagine how the Germans felt)
6)for every German killed 20 hostages would be shot, yet it did not stop them form sacrificing themselves.

These are very honorable deeds, by not occulting the less honorable deeds the real heroes would be honnored all the more. Yes there were heroes, there were bastards too, we should mention both of them.

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New vision of Vichy France as well?

The Chicago Blog: Politics and Current Events Archives

Simon Kitson, a young British scholar at the University of Birmingham, shows that it did. His exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however.

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Interesting, so I bought the book today. We´ll see...

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Now that is excellent ! Vichy arresting German agents. I sure did not hear about that! I wonder what their motivation was? I knew that it was possible for some to hate the Germans and yet like Vichy but it's the firs ttime I hear this kind of story.
This is really interesting. Thanks for posting Kai.

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French weren't cowards.

First at war, the french fought fiercely while the situation quickly began to become desperate ( 92,000 killed and 250,000 wounded for the french, 45000 killed and 110,000 wounded for the germans in six weeks of fighting, a superior death toll that in Verdun).

Then during the occupation we must understand the shock that was the defeat for the french, 8 millions of them on the roads, 1,8 million men send in Germany, the defeat of Gamelin and Weygand, two veterans of world war I (Gamelin served directly under Joffre and Weygand under Foch who once said: "If the things going wrong for France, call Weygand).

And with the war, the priority (and we must understand this) for most families was to survive, find food, clothes, protect the children ( especially when the men was POW).
Still, on 6 June 1944, they were 175,000 FFI, and 300,000 in August. If you want to fight, you must need courage but not only, you must have weapons, and you must make sure that your family is in security. That's why many FFI were young (and because of the STO).

And the "collabos" ? They were very few. For exemple, while they were 175,000 men in the FFI, 450,000 in the liberation army in june 1944, they were only 15000 men in the LVF and 35000 in the infamous milice. The problem is that this very few persons controlled metropolitan France (when it wasn't the germans). The people hated Laval or Darnand but for Petain, they simply didn't understand. Petain became a soldier to avenge 1870, he was the victor of Verdun, the man that wanted to refuse the armistice in 1918 to launch an offensive from the Lorraine to Berlin, the man that said before the war that french army hadn't a good stategy to fight against Germany.

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Nobody said they were coward Clems, 87.500 resisitants were sent to camps. I respect those who cut a wire here and there, those who delayed trains on purpose... But my deepest respect goes to those who risked their lives on a daily basis, those who helped airmen ,those who took part in actions, distributed papers, hid jews etc...

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I agree Skipper. I have never called the French "Cowards".

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman

I didn' say that for you but some people still think the french were coward (including in France), it seems we are still too proud to accept such a disaster (1940).

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You will always find these people, they are usually uneducated . Ignore them, I used to spend time with them. Instead I should have recorded accounts from veterans who are now mostly gone.

I still know many fine people who risked their lives during the war, they are veterans from the Lorient pocket, Resistants, people who sheltered airmen etc...

The problem is that they often do not want to talk about it and some loud mouth bugger will always come up with a story instead.

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Yes but we still have a problem with 1940.

Just see the return of the POW of the battle of france. While the french people was celebrating the victory, these remind of the "debacle" weren't so well treated and many tried to ignore them while these soldiers were like the resistant, they fought, they saw their friends being killed, they often resisted fiercely (and sometime vitoriously) and suffered too.

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As we say "la bataille de France, un passé qui ne passe pas.", the event we want to forget. The prisonners were the symbol of the "debacle".

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Near my hometown the 30th Gemran Division attacked the Loire front. about 100 soldiers were near the place were I live. They were ambushed , machinegunned, straffed with Stukas, but they kept fighting after 50 men were on the floor. They used their last bullets and then charged with baillonets, they killed 12 Germans in this counter attack. They managed to break through with only a few survivors. When they finally reached the Loire, they swam across it only to be told by their officers that there was an armistice. The fallen are mostly buried in orleans.

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People say the same about the Italians too. Both the French and the Italians are slurred against out of bias and ignorance. I think that is one of the reasons I like to post info that is counter to what they think they know.

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For the first time I have seen "History" at close quarters,and I know that its actual process is very different from what is presented to Posterity. - WWI General Max Hoffman

The problem is that the french are the first who ignore many thing about these event. They just don't want to know what happened in 1940 and during the occupation of continental france so they think our soldiers fled massively in 1940.

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I think that a visit to villages will help a lot of people to understand. When they see that every place has it's victims from WWI AND WWII.

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Well what do you think of this:

-France: 92,000 KIA, 250,000 wounded.
-Germany: 45,000 KIA (at least), 111,000 wounded.

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the figure one vs two is correct. It shows how effective the BlitzKrieg was. Noone was in a postion to stop Germany in 1940. You may want to dig into the Luftwaffe losses and note how tremendous theye were. Despite a heteroclyte aviation which lacked spares and with many obsolete aircrafts (including the Morane) , prototypes and planes that were in maintenance, the French id ok there. The infantry always wondered where the aviation was but in fact there were more Luftwaffe losses during the Battle of France than during the Battle of England. I can't find the figures and the sources back, but they are somewhere on a thread posted about the Battle of England some time ago. So much money has been wasted on making useless flyboats, recco airplanes instead of fighters like the Dewoitine 520 or modern Bombers.

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We did go through the German losses during the campaign in West 1940 a couple of years ago, and actually after the Sichelschnitt part the French defence actually stiffened and Germans faced more losses per day than during the early phase. So the French did not run.

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