Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance 1847181449, 9781847181442

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Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance

Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance

By

Donald Reid

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance by Donald Reid This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2007 by Donald Reid All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-144-9; ISBN 13: 9781847181442

For my father, Robert Clark Reid, and my mother, Anna Marie Murphy Reid

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................... viii Preface ................................................................................................................ix Chapter One .......................................................................................................... 1 The Narrative of Resistance in Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite Chapter Two........................................................................................................ 13 Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome Chapter Three...................................................................................................... 38 From Ravensbrück to Algiers and Noisy-le-Grand: The Dialogues with Deportation of Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz Chapter Four ....................................................................................................... 67 Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion Chapter Five........................................................................................................ 96 Available in Hell: Germaine Tillion’s Operetta of Resistance at Ravensbrück Chapter Six........................................................................................................ 106 French Singularity, the Resistance and the Vichy Syndrome: Lucie Aubrac to the Rescue Chapter Seven ................................................................................................... 127 Resistance and its Discontents: Affairs, Archives, Avowals and the Aubracs Chapter Eight .................................................................................................... 176 The Grandchildren of Godard and the Aubracs: Betrayal, Resistance, and the People Without a Memory

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ADIR

Association nationale des anciennes déportées et internées de la Résistance ALN Armée de Libération Nationale AMGOT Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories ATD-Quart Monde Aide à Toute Détresse-Quart Monde ATTAC Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières pour l’Aide des Citoyennes et Citoyens BERIM Bureau d’Études et de Recherches pour l’Industrie Moderne CCE Comité de coordination et d’exécution (FLN) CGT Confédération Générale du Travail CHDGM Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale CICRC Commission Internationale Contre le Régime Concentrationnaire CNR Conseil National de la Résistance FFI Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur FIS Front Islamique du Salut FLN Front de Libération Nationale IHTP Institut d’histoire du temps présent MLN Mouvement de Libération Nationale MUR Mouvements Unis de la Résistance NN Nacht und Nebel OAS Organisation de l’Armée Secrète OSS Office of Strategic Services PCF Parti Communiste Français REP Régiment Étranger des Parachutistes SS Waffen-Schtuzstaffel STO Service du travail obligatoire

PREFACE

I have had an opportunity, from two different angles, to gauge men’s disarray before the world they had made, and twice to see the real support an understanding—in other words, an analysis—of crushing mechanisms can afford to those being crushed (besides, this light thrown on monsters is also, I am sure, one effective way of exorcizing them). Each of us possesses this `interpretative grid’, whose mesh is progressively reduced throughout our lives. The mesh of mine was reduced between 1940 and 1945, in the fraternity of great danger, with people whose origins and cultural formation were very disparate, but who all really wanted to understand: people who were enduring things that were very hard to endure and wanted to know why. Once they had understood, in their innermost hearts, a little mechanism called reason began to operate again; and this often, quite miraculously, set in motion the delicate gears that anatomists and doctors study, which Xavier Bichat used to call “the complex of functions that resist death”. —Germaine Tillion1 [When the torture by French paratroopers during the Battle of Algiers was worst,] I thought of Jean Moulin. This helped me put into perspective [relativiser] my sufferings and procured for me a kind of anesthesia. —Louisette Ighilahriz2

A small number of French men and women made the decision to resist the occupation of their nation by Germany in 1940.3 For some of them, this existential experience would come to express elements of what Walter Benjamin, writing in Paris in 1940 on the eve of the defeat of France, called Jetztzeit, the explosive `now-time’ of truly radical challenges to power in history. Engagement with these challenges held the potential for later 1

Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Al Saqi Books, 1983), 23-24. 2 Florence Beaugé, Algérie. Une Guerre sans gloire (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005), 27. 3 For the life of Marc Bloch, see Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For Germaine Tillion, see Jean Lacouture, Le témoignage est un combat (Paris: Seuil, 2000); and Nancy Wood, Germaine Tillion, une femme-mémoire. D’un Algérie à l’autre (Paris: Autrement, 2003). For Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, see Caroline Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz (Paris: Plon, 1997); and Frédérique Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz (Paris: Cerf, 2004). The place to start for biographies of the Aubracs are their own memoirs.

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Preface

generations to open the door to new worlds: ‘a past charged with the time of the now which [could be] blasted out of the continuum of history’.4 In 1940, Marc Bloch turned to the science of history to analyze his experiences, and the society in which he lived, in order to identify and affirm allegiance to a France truly at odds with that which was taking shape in Vichy. He did not yet know the Resistance, but to make the choice he was making, he evoked the emotional, identity-confirming power he experienced in thinking of particular moments in the French past. Bloch was an historian whose understanding of history involved a dialogue of the past with the world in which he lived. Although Bloch died in the Resistance, his life would in turn take on new meanings in the collective memories of postwar France. The Resistance was an experience whose qualities were at once preserved and constructed in the memories of resisters, who could not but fear that these would be lost or suppressed when historians made the Resistance their past time. Faced with the disappointments of France after the war, resisters became archivists of the Jetztzeit of resistance in France and in the concentration camps, a ‘now-time’ only they had known when it was now, a spirit that they could (re)call up in order to try to transmit its now quality to future generations. Resisters’ commitment to resist did not end with the end of the Occupation. The acts Germaine Tillion took during the French-Algerian War and Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz took when confronted with poverty in the France of the trentes glorieuses, were of a piece with the radical nature of their earlier decision to resist. Resisters’ actions during the war provided a basis for France to reconstitute itself with honor after the war. What Henry Rousso has called the Vichy Syndrome resulted from the French nation’s identification with the myth of the French as a people in resistance and the nation’s failure after the war to confront the nature of Vichy collaboration in Nazi rule.5 Revelation of the limited nature of French resistance, and particularly of the French state’s participation in the deportation of Jews, became an obsession for postwar generations.6 Living with the Resistance had been a blessing for the French after the war, but it could also pose difficult issues for future generations. They could 4

Walter Benjamin, Thesis XIV of ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 261. 5 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). 6 For an examination of the effort to prompt such a reaction to France’s experience with Communism, see Donald Reid, `Pursuing the Communist Syndrome: Opening the Black Book of the New Anti-Communism in France’, International History Review 27 (June 2005): 295-318.

Living with the Resistance: Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and Personal and Collective Memories of Resistance in France

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never hope to do what resisters, who had given birth to the society in which they were raised, had done. If de Gaulle’s promotion of the French as a people in resistance had ironically left less place for the role of resisters, the shattering of the Gaullist myth forced the generation that came of age in 1968 to engage with the memory of the intrepid resisters of the first years of the war, whose decision to resist stood as an inspiration and a challenge. 7 Historians, with the imperative to take the mandate to narrate the past from historical actors, to make resisters figures of history, have developed a complex relationship with those who resisted.8 Tillion confronted Olga Wormser-Migot on her account of the concentration camp Tillion had known and in which her mother had died; historians of the Resistance challenged Lucie Aubrac and Raymond Aubrac about their accounts of their actions during the war.9 While a prisoner at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, Tillion wrote an operetta which features an academic giving a lecture on the camp. He will never understand the resistance of resisters in the camp; the audience learns of it only by listening to them. Filmmakers Claude Berri and Jean-Luc Godard have made the history of the Aubracs’ Resistance activity and of its memory figure in their own expressions of resistance to elements of the society in which they live. I would like to thank Lucie Aubrac, Raymond Aubrac, and Daniel Cordier, who welcomed me into their homes and spoke with me about their experience as resisters in the postwar era; and Nelly Forget and Anise PostelVinay, who answered my questions with generosity and warmth. I would also like to thank friends who have read earlier versions of these chapters, especially Herrick Chapman, Alice Conklin, and Alice Kaplan, who read a number of them. I want to express my gratitude to the Center for European Studies of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to the Guggenheim Foundation for research support. I would also like to thank the journals in which earlier versions of these essays appeared for permission to publish them: European History Quarterly, French Cultural Studies, French Politics, Culture & Society, History and Memory, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Modern History, and Modern & Contemporary France. It gives me real pleasure to thank Holly Russell, Hadley Reid and Otis Reid, whose love means so much to me.

7

See Donald Reid, `Pierre Goldman: From Souvenirs obscurs to Lieu de mémoire`, forthcoming in French Politics, Culture & Society. 8 Laurent Douzou has written a very good study of the Resistance as an historical subject: La Résistance française: une histoire périlleuse (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 9 For discussion of another such conflict in a different historical context, see Donald Reid, `Dealing with Academic Conflicts in the Classroom: Teaching I, Rigoberta Menchú As a Case Study’, Teaching History 31:1 (Spring 2006): 19-29.

CHAPTER ONE THE NARRATIVE OF RESISTANCE IN MARC BLOCH’S L’ÉTRANGE DÉFAITE

There are two kinds of Frenchmen who will never understand the history of France: those who refuse to vibrate to the memory of the coronation of Reims; those who read without emotion the story of the Festival of the Federation. The direction of their preference matters little. Their impermeability to the most beautiful bursts of collective enthusiasm condemns them. —Marc Bloch1 I will say it frankly. I hope that we still have blood to spill, even if it has to be that of those who are dear to me (I don’t speak of my own, to which I attach little value). For there is no salvation without a share of sacrifice nor national liberty that can be complete, unless we have worked to conquer it ourselves. —Marc Bloch2 I believed in the future because I was making it myself. —Jules Michelet, ‘Introduction’ to Le Peuple, copied by Marc Bloch (1940-41), shortly after finishing L’Étrange défaite3 Inverse selection, carried out systematically by Nazism, was, without a doubt, one of the most hideous characteristics of World War II. In major conflicts in the past, and even that of 1914, large somber swathes were taken from the engaged masses, most often in battles of position and attrition. This time, in the occupied territories, the best by character, judgment, and fidelity, by wanting to continue the struggle, designated themselves, and the enemy could… decimate the elite with certainty. —Georges Friedmann4 An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in Modern & Contemporary France 11 (2003): 443-452. (© Taylor and Francis, 2003) Permission to reprint has been granted by Taylor and Francis. 1 Marc Bloch, L’Étrange défaite (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 198. 2 Ibid., 207. 3 Carole Fink, ‘Marc Bloch, alias Narbonne: L’épreuve suprême’, in Pierre Deyon, JeanClaude Richez and Léon Strauss, eds., Marc Bloch, l’historien et la cité (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1997), 211n46.

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In July 1940, a few weeks after Marshall Pétain had told the French they should accept their loss to the Germans, and General Charles de Gaulle had called on the French to resist, Marc Bloch drew on his experience in the army during the drôle de guerre of 1939-40 and in the campaign of the spring of 1940 to write a manuscript which asked how France had reached this impasse and what the French should do. Referring to L’Étrange défaite in a letter to Lucien Febvre, Bloch wrote, `The historians we are will have had other experiences than those of documents [chartes]’.5 Published in 1946, the book is about finding the will and means to resist in a society that had defeated itself, a colonial power that had played the role of the hapless colonized (`the primitives’6). Febvre suggested that too few Frenchmen read L’Étrange défaite on its appearance because Bloch had not belonged to any political party7. However, this in turn helped give the text the qualities that allow Frenchmen from a diversity of political perspectives to continue to return to it in troubled times. ‘Each line’, Jean-Pierre Rioux could write in 1987, ‘lays out anxiety or hope’.8 Bloch shows the French army in 1940 was premised on a rigid conception of order, which, when faced with the unexpected, collapsed into chaos, leaving no place for ‘islets of resistance’ to the invader9: ‘the static order of an office is, in many ways, the antithesis of order, active and perpetually inventive, that the movement requires. One is a matter of routine and dressage; the other, of concrete imagination, of suppleness in intelligence and, perhaps, especially of character’.10 French army leaders, ‘ruled by their memories of the last campaign’11, proved unable to recognize that history is not a source of fixed lessons to guide future planning. This resulted in defeat. History is ‘the science of change’,12 a resource that reveals unexpected developments and contingencies as well as apparent continuities. L’Étrange défaite was written by an individual in a world of shattered collectivities, the antithesis to the bureaucratic world of reports Bloch contests 4

Georges Friedmann, ‘Maurice Halbwachs’, Europe 24:1 (1 January 1946): 45. Marc Bloch to Lucien Febvre, 26 July 1942, in Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Correspondance, ed. Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 2003), III: 208. 6 Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 67. 7 Lucien Febvre, `Vers une autre histoire’, in Combats (Paris: Armand Colin, 1953), 419n2. 8 Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘Marc Bloch. Historien résistant’, in Visages de la Résistance (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 30. 9 Bloch,. L’Étrange défaite, 81. 10 Ibid., 91. 11 Ibid., 154. 12 Ibid., 150. 5

The Narrative of Resistance in Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite

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and resists. No authority requested the work and Bloch could not know its fate: ‘Will these pages ever be published? I don’t know’. The very decision to write was the first step toward resisting the world as it was—‘how much more agreeable it would be to give in to the feelings of fatigue and discouragement’. Writing L’Étrange défaite was an affirmation of faith in a new France to come, the narrative of a resistance leading to a renaissance. Bloch begins by imagining future researchers who will find in the text something to help them pierce the ‘ignorance’ and the ‘bad faith’ in which the defeat is sure to be veiled.13 The apparent finality of the title L’Étrange défaite given the book in 1946 when the original title, Témoignage, became unavailable, is misleading. ‘Quelle étrange guerre!’, Bloch wrote a friend in December 1939.14 The defeat of France in 1940 was étrange to him in the sense of foreign and alien. However, Bloch argues that the four years of the First World War had given the French time to develop new modes of thought. Like de Gaulle in 1940, Bloch did not see the six weeks of May-June 1940 as a final defeat, but as one event in a long war. France, in continuing the struggle, would once again have the chance to nurture the new modes of thought it needed. Completing L’Étrange défaite, Bloch wrote Febvre, `The Hundred Years War did not end at Crécy, nor even at Poitiers. Yet, there it is! The poor chaps who saw Crécy did not live to see the end of the war!’15 The defeat had its roots well before 1939; the struggle would continue after 1940. *

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A deeply patriotic Jewish army captain whose family had left Alsace for France after the Franco-Prussian War delivers the scathing critique of the Intelligence Service of the French army that Captain Alfred Dreyfus had foresworn. Born in 1886, Bloch identified himself as a member of ‘the Dreyfus Affair generation’.16 Great grandchild of a volunteer in the French revolutionary army in 1793, he apologizes for needing to tell us17, Bloch refutes once again the chronic charges of questionable national allegiance made against Jews. He embodied the model French citizen and republican, the antithesis of bourgeois 13

Ibid., 29. Marc Bloch to Michel Mollat, 4 December 1939, cited in François Bédarida, ‘Marc Bloch historien, soldat et père de famille’, in `Marc Bloch à Etienne Bloch. Lettres de la “Drôle de Guerre”’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 19 (1991): 13. 15 Bloch to Febvre, 26 September 1940, in Bloch and Febvre, Correspondance, III: 105. 16 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993), 184. 17 Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 31. 14

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Chapter One

egotism, in volunteering to serve in 1939 at age fifty-three. Reflecting on his service in L’Étrange défaite, he makes the bureaucratic failings of the Intelligence Service, the 2e bureau, emblematic of French incompetence in 1940. The methods used by the 2e bureau cause ‘grievous concerns’; the information it provided was ‘contradictory’ and contained serious errors. 18 Furthermore, the 2e bureau proved unable to assess and evaluate the data it received. `Haunted by the cult of the secret’19, the Intelligence Service labeled in red ink ‘“very secret”’, information it discovered, then locked it up ‘far from the eyes of those it might concern, in a closet with three locks’.20 But Bloch also saw the army bureaucracy as making spying easy: ‘a tour of a few minutes through our office… would be sufficient to put in the hands of a spy, if there was one on our staff, quite valuable information’.21 Yet, spying was not Bloch’s explanation of the failures of the French army in 1940. ‘The triumph of the Germans was essentially an intellectual victory’22, he wrote, and he looked to consequences of the Dreyfus Affair for an explanation. Bloch begins L’Étrange défaite by explaining that his experience in rural history has taught him that the historian can learn as much about former times from reading the traces of the past visible in the palimpsest constituted by plots of land today as from reading archives.23 He sees the defeat in 1940 as bearing the traces of Dreyfus Affair. Since the divisiveness of the Affair, the teaching profession in France had failed to engage with the officer corps. As a consequence, the army was crippled by its inability to recognize the resources a republican citizenry could provide, and was unable to respond to the enemy’s practice of the unexpected. If the defeat of France had begun in France, Bloch found the response there as well. L’Étrange défaite emerges as a founding text of the Resistance when Bloch abandons the legal model of a witness presenting evidence and turns to an examination of conscience. He too, he writes, has been too engaged in his career to assume the civic role France demands of her social and cultural elite.24 But French culture contains the seeds of its own regeneration: reason exercised critically rather than to reiterate the status quo. There was no treasonous individual for the Intelligence Service to track down; there were only those Frenchmen who had not done their duty.

18

Ibid., 113, 119, 117. Ibid., 130. 20 Ibid., 116. 21 Ibid., 90. 22 Ibid., 66. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 For a telling presentation of his `bad conscience’, see Bloch to Febvre, 8 October 1939, in Bloch and Febvre, Correspondance, III: 70. 19

The Narrative of Resistance in Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite

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‘Without turning toward the present, it is impossible to understand the past’, wrote Bloch25, but the historian’s construction of the past in turn sheds light on the present. ‘The near past is, for the average man, a convenient screen; it hides from him the remote pasts of history and their tragic possibilities of renewal’.26 Early in volume one of La Société féodale, published in 1939, Bloch wrote a chapter on the ‘teachings’ derived from study of the Saracen, Hungarian and Norse invasions of western Europe in the ninth century. The nomadic raiders were born soldiers and had a great advantage over the settled communities in Western Europe defended by professional armies: The incapacity of [these communities] … to put up a truly effective resistance [to the nomadic raiders] says a lot about their internal defects…. Brave in the face of familiar dangers, simple folk are ordinarily incapable of dealing with surprise and mystery. The monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who, shortly after the event, told of the movement up the Seine, in 845, by the Norman boats—see with what a troubled voice he notes, “that we had never heard speak of such a thing nor read of such in the books”…. The letters that Alcuin sent to England after the disaster of Lindisfarne are just exhortations to virtue and repentance; of the organization of resistance, not a word…. The profound truth is that the chiefs were much less incapable of fighting if their own life or their own goods were in play, than to organize methodically the defense—and with very few exceptions—to understand the bonds between particular interests and the general 27 interest.

Bloch’s portrait of France in L’Étrange défaite echoes the opening of La Société féodale. In the France of 1940, the elite allowed individual interests to take precedence over collective interests; the highly mobile invaders took actions that stunned the defenders, who had never seen them in their books. After the defeat, collaborators displayed a willingness to ‘engage us to enter, as vassals, in the German continental system’.28 Volume two of La Société féodale appeared in 1940, when Bloch was in the army. In it, he laid out how feudalism created the social basis for a society which could protect itself from alien invaders, and which provided the origins of national allegiance (as well as the differences between France and Germany). In the final paragraph, Bloch underscored that the mutual obligations of ruler and ruled endowed the latter with the ‘“right of resistance”’ when the 25

Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 30. See also Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire, 96. Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 162. 27 Marc Bloch, La Société féodale (Paris: Albin Michel, 1968), 93-94. 28 Ibid., 182. 26

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ruler betrayed the contract binding kings and vassals.29 That is to say, out of the chaos of the earlier invasions came the basis of the social and political order at the heart of European civilization and this order embodied the right—and responsibility—of resistance to illegitimate order and injustice. This was not how supporters of the Vichy regime read this history. The response of the bourgeoisie to the victory of the Popular Front in 1936, Bloch believed, had revealed that it was having great difficulty moving from the democracy of the early Third Republic, that solidified bourgeois leadership (by displacing nobles), to one in which the lower classes exercised power and did not show deference to the bourgeoisie. The army officer corps perpetuated for the bourgeoisie this sense of a fixed social hierarchy.30 Vichy calls for a return to the soil gave voice to the bourgeois elite’s dream of a loyal peasantry. Vichy had, Bloch notes, clearly forgotten the Ur-resisters in French history, les croquants, the peasants who revolted repeatedly against state oppression in the early seventeenth century.31 In L’Étrange défaite, Bloch finds the sources for rejuvenation of France in manifestations of working-class solidarity—the world of `the Popular Front—the true, that of the crowds, not the politicians—[in which] there revived something of the atmosphere of the [Festival of the Federation held at the] Champ de Mars, in the bright sunshine of 14 July 1790’.32 The sense of participation in a shared project is what had been lost. Drawing inspiration from the anarcho-syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier, Bloch spurned unions’ Kleinbürgerlich fixation on ‘petits sous’33, and looked to the solidarity of the proletariat as an antidote to social egotism. He condemned the businessman who could not understand why workers would engage in a ‘solidarity strike’, on the grounds that it did not concern their own salaries.34 Not surprisingly, Bloch concluded, the soldier who was a scab in civilian life and betrayed his fellow miners, lacked what it took to defend his country.35 Bloch’s celebration of the qualities of the French people is accompanied by a call for the bourgeoisie to fulfill its role as an elite, not unlike the calls made to the liberal aristocracy in 1789. For Bloch, characterized as a man of the ‘bourgeois aristocracy’ by fellow resister Georges Altman36, the bourgeoisie provided the intellectual elite of France and bore responsibility for the intellectual defeat of the nation. In the nineteenth century, the rentier 29

Ibid., 618. Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 62-63. 31 Ibid., 180. 32 Ibid., 199. 33 Ibid., 171-172. 34 Ibid., 198. 35 Ibid., 136. 36 `Avant-propos de Georges Altman’, in ibid., 270. 30

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bourgeoisie had produced an intellectual class driven by neither the vagaries of the market nor the corporate straitjackets of professions like the law, medicine or the university: ‘Our bourgeoisie, which remains, despite all, the brains of the nation, undoubtedly had a greater taste for serious studies at the time when it was, in large measure, a class of rentiers’.37 However, the twentieth-century bourgeoisie to which Bloch belonged was increasingly rooted in business and the professions. Bloch believed that this bourgeoisie had failed to perform the civic mission French society required: ‘Above all, we were taken up by daily tasks. For most, there remained only the right to say we were good workers. Were we always good enough citizens?’38 Bourgeois who recognized the problems besetting France in the interwar years, but did not speak out, or who saw these developments as irresistible and any attempt to counter them as ‘the desperate gestures of a shipwrecked individual’, were wrong.39 Resistance is an act of self-defense in the sense of defense of the self, but not the self of the egotistical. Resistance is a response to the corruption of the self which could result from the shame and humiliation of defeat. It was not too late to resist the temptation not to resist. L’Étrange défaite can be read as opening the way to a critique of the Annales methodology Bloch himself had pioneered between the wars. Had it devoted insufficient attention to acts of individual agency, like the resistance on which Bloch would embark? Bloch’s experience in World War I helped him forge the fundamental Annales category of mentality, a concept that Bloch can be seen using in L’Étrange défaite to interpret the failed institutions of Third Republic France as well as the other France which could resist. However, L’Étrange défaite also asks the historian to analyze how and why individuals like the citizen Bloch acted in extreme situations, a problematic whose new questions and new ways of answering them is broached in L’Étrange défaite and Bloch’s other major wartime text, Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien. In the opening chapter of L’Étrange défaite, Bloch tells of donning civilian clothes to escape capture by the Germans: ‘the only means to continue to serve, in any fashion, my country’. If, at first, he felt a ‘certain discomfort at living in a lie’, he would learn to give in to ‘the malicious pleasure, finally to get the best of these gentlemen [the Germans], without them suspecting a thing’.40 Evading capture was Bloch’s first act of a resistance that would necessarily develop outside of the army. An officer tells Bloch he learned from the war in 1940, `“that there are professional soldiers who will never be warriors; [and]

37

Ibid., 184. Ibid., 205. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 52-54. 38

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civilians, to the contrary, who, by nature, are warriors”’.41 Bloch himself argued that ‘for the development of the qualities needed in such new circumstances [as are found in war], many civil professions are a much better school’ than the military.42 After the Germans occupied southern France in November 1942, the authorities advised Bloch to leave his teaching post at Montpellier. Then they revoked his appointment for ‘abandonment of position in the face of the enemy’: vile wording, wrote Febvre, ‘when one thinks that it was perhaps dictated, in any case counter-signed, by… the same “enemy”’.43 In 1943, a student put the ex-professor Bloch in contact with the Franc-Tireur resistance movement. Living the double life as traveling salesman ‘M. Blanchard’ (the name of the general he excoriated in L’Étrange défaite for speaking of capitulation when continued combat should have been the order of the day44), Bloch served on the Comité directeur of Franc-Tireur and as Rhône-Alpes regional delegate to the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR), where his organizational skills were put to the test. Captured by the Germans, he was executed in June 1944. In L’Étrange défaite, Bloch vents his frustration with the fruitless bureaucratic labors he was assigned in the army. These did not recognize or draw on his skills. The Resistance made use of Bloch’s talents and gave him authority no captain in the army would exercise. France, Bloch contended, had been undermined by a reified culture, but the world-turned-upside-down of the Resistance offered an opportunity to defeat this culture and, in so doing, to prefigure the France of the future. Dominique Veillon, historian of FrancTireur, characterizes Bloch’s work as disentangling a knotted skein, favouring the creation of autonomous services in a number of places over their centralization in a single locale in order to deal with the diversity of functions in a resistance organization45: in the words of Bloch’s biographer, Carole Fink, he ‘distinguished himself by bringing order and discipline to a hitherto chaotic organization.’46 Bloch got the chance to create and live the world of information exchange and contingency whose absence he saw at the heart of the failure of the French army. The Resistance Bloch projected in L’Étrange défaite was secondarily about defeating Germany and primarily about forging a new French culture, a culture which would emerge from the chrysalis of defeated 41

Ibid., 33. Ibid., 138. 43 Lucien Febvre, ‘Marc Bloch et Strasbourg’, in Combats, 405. 44 Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 143. 45 Dominique Veillon, Le Franc-Tireur (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 176. 46 Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 306. 42

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France. `All national calamities call, first of all, for an examination of conscience; then (for the examination of conscience is only a morose gratification, if it does not result in an effort to make things better) for establishing a plan of renewal’.47 *

*

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The Marc Bloch of L’Étrange défaite has become an icon and an oracle in the world of the Vichy Syndrome48, a citoyen thaumaturge whose identity as Jewish republican patriot resister and martyr today offers a healing touch: ‘the heroic figure of our good and bad consciences as citizens’.49 In 2006, a number of prominent historians asked that Bloch’s ashes be placed in the Panthéon.50 Bloch might even be seen as a lieu de mémoire, in the sense that Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire are grottoes, suitable for pilgrimages of the imagination, that resulted from the identification and destruction of an all-encompassing collective memory by the very kind of historical examination that Bloch himself championed.51 As the defining national trauma moved from the defeat of France to Vichy participation in the Holocaust, the relation of Bloch’s critique in L’Étrange défaite to national identity changed. When L’Étrange défaite was first published, Raymond Aron astutely recognized that what made Bloch’s analysis so telling was that it confronted the French on the terrain of what they considered their natural strength, intellectual ability. ‘Moral self-accusation often serves [the French] as an alibi to avoid intellectual critique’.52 From this perspective, the turn, a generation after publication of L’Étrange défaite, to uncovering the repressed nature of Vichy collaboration, was a reassuring assertion for the French of their intellectual power of revelation in the service of a project of national moral self-accusation. In October 1940, a few weeks after Bloch finished L’Étrange défaite, Vichy promulgated the Statute of the Jews. Emancipation of the Jews and their integration into French institutions had been a fundamental legacy of the France of the Revolution. The National Revolution pursued by Vichy did not simply deny that Jews were French; in so doing, it denied that it was France. Bloch 47

Marc Bloch, ‘Sur la réforme de l’enseignement’, in Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 254. Olivier Dumoulin, Marc Bloch (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Presses des Sciences Politiques, 2000), esp. 21-50. 49 Bertrand Müller, ‘Marc Bloch et les années trente: l’historien, l’homme et l’histoire’, in Deyon, Richea and Strauss, eds., Marc Bloch, 159. 50 Libération, 2 June 2006. 51 See Pierre Nora, `Between Memory and History’, in Realms of Memory, ed. Pierre Nora; trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 1-20. 52 Raymond Aron, `Méditations sur la défaite’, Critique 12 (1947): 440. 48

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explains in L’Étrange défaite that he identified as Jewish only when faced with an anti-semite.53 The Resistance revealed itself to be the true France because the Resistance was the only incarnation of France that would let Bloch be French.54 He resisted strenuously Febvre’s plan in 1941 to drop Bloch’s name from Annales, in order to allow the journal they had co-founded to be published in Paris (required because Bloch was Jewish). Febvre believed only this would prevent `a new death for [his] country’55 and destruction of ‘an instrument of emancipation of the first order’56, which would provide ‘an unexpected victory’ for ‘the Beast’.57 What Febvre termed Bloch’s ‘desertion’58 would have been an ‘abdication’ for Bloch59, a shameful pursuit (by others) of professional interests, like that which had corrupted the bourgeois elite before the war. Febvre’s behaviour features prominently in the forty-page reflection written to Bloch with which Daniel Schneidermann, columnist for Le Monde, concludes his account of the trial of Maurice Papon, L’Étrange procès. Each night of the trial Schneidermann read a few lines from Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite and found in Bloch the antithesis of Papon. L’Étrange défaite served as ‘an excellent antidote to the poisons of the court session of the day’; Bloch ‘cleanses the spirit of the daily defilement of the renunciations and compromises’ that ‘the Papon trial and its descent into the spirit of Vichy’ inflicted on Schneidermann.60 Bloch’s critique of army bureaucracy as unable to deal with the unexpected becomes for Schneidermann a critique of the Vichy administrative bureaucracy that appeared unable to deal with the unthinkable— to say non to deportations of Jews. Bloch found in the Dreyfus Affair the divorce of institutions of the French republic, like the army, from university professors, increasingly the new face of intellectuals in France. He was not the voice of the intellectual for whom engagement was solely speaking the truth of universal principles to power. He chastised himself and others for failing to make the principles of the history they pursued in places like Annales operative in the bureaucracies upon which the 53

Bloch, L’Étrange défaite, 31. Bloch actively opposed Vichy creation of the Union générale des israélites de France because he believed it ghettoized French Jews, treating them as Jews first and French second. 55 Febvre to Bloch, 19 April 1941, in Bloch and Febvre, Correspondance, III: 127. 56 Febvre to Bloch, 3 May 1941, in ibid., III: 132. 57 Ibid. 58 Febvre to Bloch, 19 April 1941, in ibid., III:125. 59 Bloch to Febvre, 16 April 1941, in ibid., III:123. 60 Daniel Schneidermann, L’Étrange procès (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 170. There is a Cercle Marc Bloch, active c. 1999-2000 and more recently. It has focused on opposition to Holocaust denial. See http//membres.lycos.fr/cmbloch (accessed 30 November 2006). 54

The Narrative of Resistance in Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite

11

Republic depended. 61 In L’Étrange défaite, Bloch presents the Dreyfus Affair not primarily as evidence of an anti-semitism at the core of French political culture, a leitmotif of accounts of Vichy complicity in the Holocaust, but as an event that weakened the Republic by creating barriers among its elites. Is the France that Bloch evoked in L’Étrange défaite disappearing? Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 1980: Getting goose bumps at the memory of the coronation of Reims, and always feeling the same emotion when reading the account of the festival of the Federation. Being willing to give your life for your country on a moment’s notice. Until quite recently, this is what it meant to be French. And these were the criteria used to measure the extent to which Jews had really become part of France. Today, the magnetism no longer holds. Deprived of its former attraction, the paradigm fractures and falls apart. And not just for Jews. The disaffection has become general: the French on the whole are distancing themselves from any such collective enthusiasm. No longer finding commonality in their territorial identity, they imperceptibly cease dramatizing France. 62

Other republican activists contest Finkielkraut’s observation, and turn to L’Étrange défaite to call up the France Bloch invoked in 1940. Communists, Trotskyists, Socialists, and republicans, hostile to what they saw as a commodification of public culture and encroachments on the nation state in the Treaty of Amsterdam governing the European Union, launched a Fondation Marc-Bloch in March 1998.63 The Fondation saw itself confronted with the ‘étrange défaite’ of the Mitterrand presidency and made frequent reference to Bloch’s text of that name.64 `It required the Nazi Occupation for a new elite [the resisters] to emerge’, one founder of the Fondation explained, in presenting their project.65 If the French no longer get goose bumps hearing of kings and the 61 L’Étrange défaite is the document to which historians still turn when fulfilling Bloch’s injunction to bring the scientific method of history to bear on the political culture of the republic. See Annette Wieviorka’s use of L’Étrange défaite to critique the positions of participants at the U.N. Durban conference on racism in 2001. Le Monde, 19 September 2001. Daniel Hémery and other historians also call on Bloch—‘Marc Bloch, reviens!’— to condemn legislation requiring instruction on French colonialism to valorize the European presence. Libération, 8 June 2006. 62 Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, trans. Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 85. 63 Libération, 27 September 1999. 64 Association pour la Fondation Marc Bloch, ‘Appel’, Panoramiques 35 (1998): 221222. 65 Le Monde, 29 September 1998. Etienne Bloch, Marc Bloch’s son, filed suit against the Fondation for illicit use of his father’s name for an association opposed to the European

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Revolution, they may still understand the history of France, when they vibrate to L’Étrange défaite, the text in which Marc Bloch wrote himself into resistance.

vision he believed his father had championed. The Fondation claimed it was evoking the resister Bloch writing as a citizen, and therefore a figure in the public domain, not Bloch the historian. However, the Fondation lost the case (Le Monde, 10-11 October 1999) and renamed itself the Fondation du 2 mars, after the date of its creation in 1998. See http://notre.republique.free.fr/amisafmb.htm (accessed 6 December 2006).

CHAPTER TWO GERMAINE TILLION AND RESISTANCE TO THE VICHY SYNDROME

Those in charge cannot always prefer `their mother to justice’, to the constraints of a fixed objective. But it is likely that faced with the revelations brought by the report of Dorine [a wartime report to Allied governments on conditions in the camps by a French resister who had been in Ravensbrück and escaped], they said in the offices: `It’s a crazy woman. She is raving about persecution, a Frenchwoman haunted by the Jardin des Supplices’. —Olga Wormser-Migot1 It was luck that people [like Wormser-Migot] weren’t in the camps. You can’t imagine, you know, the things that could happen [there]. So she judged all this and she was much too assertive and much too skeptical….She did not feel the drama of the concentration camps. This escaped her. She reasoned like a normal woman. So that I find Germaine Tillion more trustworthy. —Georges Wellers2

Henry Rousso suggests that after the war Charles de Gaulle offered the French a mirror in which they could see themselves during the Occupation as they wanted to be seen. When this mirror broke after 1968, the emerging obsessions of what Rousso has termed the Vichy Syndrome had two components. The dominant element was recognition of the nature of the collaboration of the Vichy Regime with the Third Reich, particularly in the An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in History and Memory 15:2 (Fall/Winter 2003): 36-63. (© Indiana University Press, 2003) Permission to reprint has been granted by Indiana University Press. 1 Olga Wormser-Migot, Le Retour des déportés (Paris: Éditions Complexe, 1985), 176. Preferring one’s mother to justice is a reference to Albert Camus’ position on the FrenchAlgerian War. Le Jardin des supplices [the Garden of Tortures] is the title of a novel by Octave Mirbeau, published in 1899. Wormser-Migot is the author’s married name; she is identified as Wormser-Migot throughout this essay. 2 Michel Folco, `Dans Un Champ de Mines’, Zéro 8 (May 1987): 72. Wellers is an Auschwitz survivor who testified at the trial of Adolf Eichmann and co-authored a work on the gas chambers with Germaine Tillion.

Chapter Two

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deportation of Jews. Confrontation with the previously unacknowledged degree of French support for and acquiescence to Vichy authority fed a second element of the Syndrome: an attack on the hegemony of Resistance memory of the war. The issue was both whether a `silent majority’ in France during the war had favored Vichy rather than the Resistance, and whether the resisters’ memory of their own experiences had been corrupted by fabulists. For no one were conflicts over the Resistance memory more painful than for deported resisters, who had themselves struggled for recognition and distinction after the war. At Ravensbrück, Germaine Tillion had developed the narrative of extermination she has presented over the succeeding half-century. This narrative became an element of the Resistance interpretation of the war. After 1968 Tillion played an important role in critiquing representations both of the French as fundamentally sympathetic to the Vichy regime and of the deported resisters’ memory as mythopoetic, a charge brought by the historian Olga WormserMigot. The struggle against the generation of Holocaust negationists of the 1970s and 1980s, the height of what Rousso refers to as the `Jewish memory’ phase of the Vichy Syndrome obsession, was ushered in by this earlier conflict among historians and deported resisters, neither of whom had any doubts about the Nazi use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews. We will conclude by examining the nature of the `unfinished mourning’ Rousso identifies at the heart of the Vichy Syndrome and the ways in which this concept, transferred from the individual to the collective by Rousso, is enriched when it is brought back from collective psychology in order to analyze the individual in the case of Tillion. *

*

*

Germaine Tillion is an ethnologist who studied the inhabitants of the southern Aurès in Algeria from 1934 to 1940. She returned to France in time to hear Philippe Pétain’s capitulation. She was eating in a stranger’s kitchen and went out in the street and threw up. ‘From that moment, the Vichy government was, for me, that of a foreign country’.3 Beginning in June 1940, Tillion played a major role in the Réseau du Musée de l’Homme, one of the first resistance groups in France. She was arrested in 1942 and deported the following year to Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp created solely for women. Her mother, Émilie Tillion, was also arrested for Resistance activities and sent to Ravensbrück. She died in a gas chamber there in March 1945. Late the following month, Tillion was released and on her return to France put aside her work on Algeria for study of the camps. The British would allow only one 3

Georges-Marc Benamou, C’était un temps déraisonnable. Les premiers résistants racontent (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), 244.

Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome

15

French deportee to attend all the 1947 trials of Ravensbrück camp administrators (for witnesses could not attend trials before they testified), and two deportee organizations chose Tillion as their representative. The trials were a disappointment to Tillion, leaving her with `the memory of a nightmare’,4 because trials of individuals for individual offenses could do justice neither to what had happened in the camps nor to the perpetrators’ role in sustaining the camp universe. The trials ‘skimmed over the facts’5; ‘the representation—re-presentation—of crimes followed its course, and I measured the deepening of the abyss being dug between what really happened and the uncertain re-presentation we call history’.6 Only the defendants and former prisoners could understand what was being said as the prosecutors and public had never entered the univers concentrationnaire. `During the war crimes trials I attended in 1946 and 1947, I made the striking discovery that both witnesses and defendants, using the same esoteric language, were at first understood only among themselves, excluding the judges and the public’.7 The judicial system proved so inadequate to deal with the camps that, wrote Tillion: for the first time in my life, I asked herself if the beautiful fascinating mirages for which we died were truly worth having one poor human so painfully sacrifice her unique little life. In captivity we never doubted that we were in the straight line of truth, and each new horror confirmed us in our certainty that we were not wrong in choosing to fight against such horrors. But what a setback it is to say, when we have already wagered all and lost, that in the face of such horrors [monstruosités constructives], seen from our eyes, weighed and measured with 8 all our suffering, there are only velleities….

4

Germaine Tillion, À la recherche du vrai et du juste, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 34 [1978]. The original publication date for materials from this collection is given here in brackets. 5 Ibid., 48 [1991]. 6 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbruck (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 142. 7 Ibid., 207. 8 Tillion, À la recherche, 155-184 (p. 172 quoted) [1946-1949]. Tillion criticized British judicial practice, which had no place for the extensive instruction that preceded a French trial. One reading of Tillion’s historical work is as the instruction she saw lacking at Hamburg. For fellow Ravensbrück deportee Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz]’s critique of the British trial and praise of the instruction and trial of a Ravensbrück commandant done in the French zone, see her L’Allemagne jugée par Ravensbrück (Paris: Les Grandes Éditions Françaises, 1947) and Olivier Lalieu, La Déportation fragmentée: les anciens déportés parlent de politique 1945-1980 (Paris: Boutique de l’Histoire, 1994), 105.

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Trials examine criminal aberrations in a normal world, but Tillion found them inadequate to understand a world in which the criminal act was not an aberration. But did this normal world really want to know about the camps? Many French, though feeling no responsibility for deportation of their countrymen, sought to avoid dealing with deportees’ experiences, which they could understand only as a challenge to appreciation of their own personal suffering during the war.9 Tillion’s friend, Ravensbrück deportee Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], wrote of the deep hurt caused by the `general indifference’ to camps manifested at the time of the trials: ‘this indifference affected us more than [testimony about] any of the atrocities’.10 The incomprehension with which camp survivors were met contributed to their retrospective relationship to those they saw die—a relationship which psychiatrists speak of as burdened by `impaired mourning’.11 Certainly one source of the concept of `unfinished mourning’ which informs Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome is camp survivors’ effort to come to terms with their experience; the `duty to remember’ which they pledged to one another in the camps evolved into a mantra for a succeeding generation of French men and women. Later, Tillion would be representative of deportees who resisted the shift of the `duty to remember’ from memory of Frenchmen who had suffered and died in the camps to memory of the French collectivity accused of facilitating their deportation. Conflicts over how the French in the camps were to be remembered had roots in the postwar delineation of categories like déporté(e). Only a minority of those sent to camps had been resisters12; the designation deportee was hotly debated after the war. The postwar memoirs of resisters who had returned from Ravensbrück brought out the high moral qualities resisters had revealed in the camp—they remained true to what had brought them to Ravensbrück. Deported resisters presented this memory as answering the needs of a demoralized postwar France embarked on reconstruction.13 While 9

Germaine Tillion, `À la recherche de la vérité’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 192. 10 de Gaulle [Anthonioz], L’Allemagne jugée par Ravensbrück, 23. De Gaulle Anthonioz is the name she took when she married after the war. 11 Richard Raskin, Nuit et brouillard (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987), 167. 12 Tillion estimated that among the French at Ravensbrück one-third were resisters; onethird common law prisoners; and one-third hostages and innocent people rounded up by the Germans. À la recherche, 98n1 [1958]. 13 Nelly Gorce, Journal de Ravensbrück (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 43, 65, 89-90; Simone Lahaye, Libre parmi les morts (Paris: Berg, 1983), 60; Micheline Maurel, Un camp très ordinaire (Paris: Éditions du Minuit, 1957), 83; Tillion, `À la recherche’, 38; and M.-C. Vaillant-Couturier, Mes 27 mois entre Auschwitz et Ravensbrück (Paris: Éditions du Mail, 1946), 32-33.

Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome

17

Communist deportee organizations favored a broad designation of deportees as all those deported except common law prisoners, Tillion’s Association nationale des anciennes deportées et internées de la Résistance (ADIR)14, the organization of female deported resisters, almost all of whom had been in Ravensbrück, sought a special status for deported resisters. The ADIR did not join other deportee associations in protesting the establishment in 1948 of two statutes of deportees: resisters—those who had chosen; and a clearly less prestigious catchall `political’, which embraced non-convicts deported for other reasons, including race (Jews), as well as those arrested erroneously in round-ups.15 Resisters at Ravensbrück had resented the Germans’ designation of all French prisoners as `political’, whether they were resisters, black marketers, or prostitutes who had given German soldiers syphilis—a lack of professional conscience, not `sabotage’, Tillion commented.16 `Oh! The horror of the miserable promiscuity’, wrote Simone Saint-Clair in 1945. `It was that, I believe, from which we suffered the most’.17 Those who had not chosen to take the risks resisters had taken were unlikely to do so when deported for some other reason. They were, Tillion wrote, `often a dead weight to drag’ for resisters at Ravensbrück.18 After the war, resisters championed the division not made by camp administrators. In 1955-56, when it appeared that parliament would grant the title `deportee’ to conscripted Frenchmen sent to work in German factories (Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO)), but who had not been subject to the horrors of the camps, the ADIR voiced its shock: `Our efforts will therefore have been in vain. As in the time of the Resistance, we find ourselves more and more isolated in a country which is letting itself give way to mediocrity’.19 `What can appear as an anodyne grammarian’s quarrel’, the 14 Dominique Veillon, `L’Association nationale des anciennes deportées et internées de la Résistance’, in Alfred Wahl, ed., Mémoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Metz: Centre de recherche histoire et civilisation/Université de Metz, 1984), 161-179. 15 Lalieu, La Déportation fragmentée, 77. 16 `Some of my comrades tried to elevate and evangelize them; the results were null… waste irremediably lost for society’, wrote Tillion in 1946. `À la recherche’, 35, 40-42. 17 Simone Saint-Clair, Ravensbrück. L’Enfer des femmes (Paris: Tallandier, 1945), 71. See also Yvonne Pagniez, Scènes de la bagne (Paris: Flammarion, 1947), 68-69; and Denise Dufournier, La Maison des mortes (Paris: Hachette, 1945), 89. 18 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 41. However, when historians and deported resisters met in 1951 to map out a projet for collecting documentation on the camps, Tillion objected when the historian Henri Michel said that they should not solicit the testimony of deported criminals as this might seem to offer them ‘a sort of rehabilitiation’. Tillion responded that everyone’s testimony should be collected. Sylvie Lindeperg, “Nuit et Brouillard”: Un film dans l’histoire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), 28. 19 `L’ADIR s’oppose à l’attribution du titre de “Déporté” aux STO’, Voix et Visages 47 (October 1955): 3. This designation was blocked after further parliamentary debate in

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ADIR opined, `in fact hides an attempt at the rehabilitation of vichysme to the detriment of the Resistance’.20 The ADIR hoped that Alain Resnais’ documentary film, Night and Fog, commissioned to mark the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps, would `contribute strongly to give an exact and full meaning to the word “deportee” that STO conscripts have claimed for their use’.21 Night and Fog refers to a decree of 7 December 1941, which mandated that resisters in western occupied territories, whose cases could not be resolved immediately, would be deported. The designation Nacht und Nebel (NN) was taken from Richard Wagner’s Rheingeld, where Alberich recites a magical incantation to render himself invisible to his slaves in order to torment them. The German decree was intended to avoid trials and make resisters in occupied territories in the West disappear: all requests for information on NN prisoners’ location or survival were rejected.22 Keeping populations in occupied nations uninformed as to the fate of NN prisoners was seen as a way of controlling them. The very nebulous nature of the decree, the fact that NN prisoners often did not learn of their designation for some time and did not understand what NN meant, made it the site of morbid fantasizing during and after the war. Unlike most other non-racial deportees, NN prisoners were not assigned to contract labor outside the camps. A French NN prisoner at Ravensbrück, Paulette Don Zimmet, evoked the mystery the term held for the NN prisoners themselves: `We never knew exactly if this term applied to the prisoner who, before being executed, had for a time to be plunged into the night, or to those cases incomprehensible to the interrogators—cases for which the interrogators’ tortures had not cleared things and remained for them “night and fog”’.23 Tillion did not learn of her NN status until her arrival at Ravensbrück. She saw NN designating those `who were not supposed to survive’.24 Catherine Roux, a fellow Ravensbrück inmate, but not NN, looked upon the NN block as `that disquieting forbidden vessel where the passengers had already broken their bonds to the Earth… living exiles of life’.25 1957. Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide. Entre le mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), 27-29. 20 Veillon, `L’Association’, 175. 21 `Nuit et Brouillard’, Voix et Visages 49 (January-February 1956): 7. 22 `Note inédite de Mme. Germaine Tillion’, in Pierre Sudreau, Au-delà de toutes les frontières (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991), 88-89. 23 Paulette Don Zimmet, Les Conditions d’existence et l’état sanitaire des femmes déportées en Allemagne (Ambilly-Annemasse: Imprimerie Franco-Suisse, 1947), 16n1. 24 Germaine Tillion, La Traversée du mal. Entretiens avec Jean Lacouture (Paris: Arléa, 1997), 72. 25 Catherine Roux, Triangle rouge (Lyon: M. Audin, 1946), 86.

Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome

19

When Tillion arrived at Ravensbrück, she was placed in quarantine with Czechs sent from Auschwitz, so she learned the difference between camps like Ravensbrück and Auschwitz immediately.26 While at Ravensbrück, Tillion used information on the camp’s daily expenditures on inmates and the rate charged enterprises that contracted for them, data that inmates assigned to work in the camp offices provided her, to show fellow inmates that the camp was a profitable enterprise for the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who owned Ravensbrück and leased it to the state—an interpretation Pierre Vidal-Naquet would later characterize as marxisme à l’état sauvage.27 The SS killed inmates through labor, confident that a new supply of workers was always available. Profits were used to maintain the SS. Tillion characterized this as extermination through labor on a continuum with the outright extermination of Jews. Labor camps and extermination camps `were complementary, ruled by the same principles and differing only in the extermination rate’.28 `In the general perspective of the German camps’, Tillion wrote on returning to France, `the camouflage of assassinations will have been the only originality of Ravensbrück; it was necessary not to risk provoking panics which would paralyze a model industrial group’.29 The SS `made a vague terror reign’, but `avoided threats which were too precise’.30 They never admitted to killing the apparently less productive inmates. The SS put them on `black transports’, ostensibly for prisoners requiring convalescence or less demanding work, but in fact for those to be executed as revealed by the return of their clothes to sorting centers at Ravensbrück. It was a `regulatory element—normal, essential—of the Nazi concentration camps system in every place where the camps were not organized for extermination on site`.31 Extermination was `always latent’ in the camps; it was `fundamentally, their raison d’être’.32 Until the final months of the war, there was `especially a difference of rhythm in extermination’, between camps like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.33 In sum, if racism taken to its logical endpoint dictated extermination, so did a productivist logic in which an 26

Tillion, La Traversée, 69-70. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, `Réflexions sur trois Ravensbrück’, in Réflexions sur le génocide, 3 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), III:198. 28 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 24. Tillion believed that the ten per cent of arrivals to Auschwitz who were set aside to work assured that it would be a source of profit as well. Ibid., 26. 29 Ibid., 74. 30 Ibid., 68. 31 Germaine Tillion, `Réflexions sur l’étude de la Déportation (à propos de documents allemands confrontés avec des témoignages de déportés)’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 15-16 (July-September 1954):15. 32 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 22. Dates in parentheses specify the edition of the text. 33 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 87. 27

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endlessly renewable source of labor dictated the extermination of laborers whose production could no longer cover maintenance costs. The profit motive of the `ingenious capitalist’ Himmler34 made particular sense to NN prisoners like Tillion. She assumed that as a NN prisoner she was designated for extermination. Only a need for labor within the camp could explain why NN prisoners like herself were not immediately executed, even if, she came to believe, Himmler was more interested in the power the profits could fund than in the profits themselves. For Tillion, the key to understanding the camps was that Himmler and his small SS staff operated both `rapid extermination’ camps like Auschwitz and `slow extermination’ camps like Ravensbrück (before accelerating in 1945), and SS officers moved from one camp to another. This circulation allowed `“flexible” moves from one rhythm of extermination to another’. The researcher finds `the same routines of murders’, which varied between camps only in terms of the number to be killed per day.35 As the Soviets moved westward into Poland and Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, the administration of the camps became chaotic. When Auschwitz was abandoned, its commander and convoys of Jews moved to Ravensbrück, and what Tillion termed `the terrible carousel of death’ began. The methodic extermination of Jews at Auschwitz haunted the imagination of all camp commanders and, Tillion contended, spurred them to improvise to fulfill the vision of Auschwitz in other camps. It is possible to define a zone of civilization as much by the mirage that it creates of an ideal society as by precise and real actions. To understand the “civilisation concentrationnaire”, it is necessary never to forget its most monstrous aspects: it was haunted by the horrific image of the methodic extermination applied to the Jews, of which Auschwitz will remain the prototype and it is this image—more than the imprecise orders of the central government—which, in our opinion, played a determining role in the extermination of the non-Jews over the course of the last three months of the war…. It is the initiative, the zeal, the imagination of the SS general staff, which, starting with a quite vague extermination order, impossible to control and which was moreover revoked, improvised the assassination of a mass of prisoners.36

34

Ibid., 48. Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 22, 49. 36 Tillion, `Réflexions sur l’étude’, 3. Thus Mittwerda, a place which did not exist but to which Ravensbrück prisoners were sent and never returned, made sense to Tillion who saw it in line with the Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren’s desire for a `ventilation [the separate valuation of objects sold together] of mortality’ in the hecatomb of the final months of the war. Tillion believed that in the absence of `black transports’, which had 35

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Doctors and SS officers at Ravensbrück participated in an accelerated culling of those whose age or infirmities had earlier made them candidates for `black transports’. As these destinations became no longer accessible, the use of `black transports’ was phased out and more killing, including of prisoners sent from closed camps, had to be done in camps in Germany, like Ravensbrück. M.C. Vaillant-Couturier, a non-Jewish French resister sent to Auschwitz and then to Ravensbrück, wrote that early in 1945, with arrival of prisoners from abandoned camps in the east, Ravensbrück became so full that the SS adapted practices there that recalled those at Auschwitz.37 Extermination through famine and exposure, poison, and shooting proved insufficient. A small gas chamber was built in a camp adjoining Ravensbrück, in which Tillion’s mother died in March 1945. After the war, the narrative of extermination that took different forms for resister and racial deportees fit with a republican goal of recreating French unity. However, if a deportee narrative culminating in extermination, like the narrative of a people in resistance, found support in the first generation after the war, both narratives came under fire when, as Rousso writes, the mirror through which France had remembered (and forgotten) its past broke. The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961; the arrival in metropolitan France in 1962 of Algerian Jews who felt betrayed a second time by France; and the fear that Israel would be destroyed in 1967 (and its stunning victory) created an audience in France for an analysis of the particular experience of Jews in occupied France. In 1968, radical youth rejected both the Gaullists and the Communists, bedrocks of the myth of the French people united in Resistance. Elements of this youth recognized that the social order they opposed depended on the historical memory provided by this foundation myth. For the children of the era of economic recovery, `unfinished mourning’ mutated into anger over betrayal of republican values by a France embodied in the Vichy regime. Tillion reacted strongly in 1971 to the denigration of France as a nation of people in resistance in Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity, a film which marked an important step in the migration of French agency during the war from resistance to betrayal, exemplified by the betrayal of Jews in France. Although only a small minority of the French had joined Resistance movements, Tillion believed that they were emblematic of the French population as a whole. Her argument resonated with her work immediately after the war, which contended that the moral qualities deported resisters had shown at Ravensbrück revealed earlier taken killings off the Ravensbrück account books, Suhren `undoubtedly dreamed of a total extermination of witnesses, of a cleansing by death, and in a totally empty camp, carefully swept by the last prisoner, beautiful statistics proving that they died less here than elsewhere and that all here was perfectly correct’. `À la recherche’, 76. 37 Vaillant-Couturier, Mes 27 mois, 36.

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the true nature of the French. Tillion found herself in the awkward position of the deported resister who repeatedly evoked the noble sentiments and actions of French who had not joined the Resistance or been sent to a camp: this stance in the 1970s protected the meaning of personal sacrifices she and those close to her had made thirty years before. Tillion said she had never been turned down when as a resister she had asked for assistance. She drew attention to the largely female networks that helped POWs escape in 1940 (and were never given resister status). Fallen British airmen and many French Jews had survived because so many French who were not in the Resistance participated in sheltering them.38 `All the deportees threw from the train windows… dozens of thousands of bits of paper, containing an address and few words. Only a very few of these messages did not arrive at their destination’.39 Gathered by trainmen and others, these notes were recopied and mailed. Those who did this are not counted in the official Resistance, she notes, `but they were there in any case’.40 And, in recent years, Tillion has followed the spirit of this argument by taking steps toward incorporating those in the camps whom resisters had spurned in their memoirs after the war.41 French resisters in the camps assumed that although they might die, the national culture for which they fought would survive. In contrast, as Annette Wieviorka argues in L’Ère du témoin, Yiddishophone Central European Jews

38

Tillion, À la recherche, 98, 111-112 [1958], 125-126 [1991], 135-136 [1980], 140-141 [1987], 401 [2000]. `You can imagine’, Tillion explained, `the Resistance of 1940 and 1941 as a crystallization: each crystal, by its multiple facets, touches on an infinity of analogous crystals, and, gradually, as they enter into contact with the still inert and liquid mass—but saturated with salt—which the French population represented, this mass crystallized in turn’. Ibid., 111 [1958]. And Tillion turned to a related metaphor to criticize the Vichy Syndrome. `The danger for the historian who looks at an event from a distance are its appearances—but in a liquid which ferments, appearances are the few bubbles while the chemical work goes on invisibly’. Ibid., 135 [1980]. 39 Ibid, 91 [1968], 133 [1971] [quoted]. On these letters as evidence of a diffuse French resistance, see also Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec, J’ai eu vingt ans à Ravensbrück (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 297-299. 40 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 146. 41 In 1990 Tillion explained that it was `unjust’ to `oppose radically’ common law and political prisoners—individuals of courage and honor could be found among both groups. À la recherche, 189 [1990]. In 2000, she spoke of the `worthy little prostitutes, good comrades’, at Ravensbrück. `Germaine Tillion’ [interview with Irène Michine], Le Patriote Résistant 726 (April 2000): 21; and in 2004 of prostitutes following the resisters’ example to ‘become as much resister as we were’. Allison Rice, `“Déchiffrer le silence”: A Conversation with Germaine Tillion’, Research in African Literatures 35:1 (Spring 2004): 166.

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mourned the death of their culture with their own death in the camps.42 Genocide evokes a narrative of a radical break with a culture that no longer exists—it can be never again because those who carry the culture are gone— while Resistance memory always looks forward to realization of its as yet unrealized promise. Rather than accepting and valorizing differentiated narratives of the deportation experiences of Jews and other deportees, Tillion recognizes the different experiences of the two groups, but contests a narrative that reifies this difference. Tillion sought to contribute what she saw as the best of France—the moral virtue of deported resisters—to rebuilding a demoralized France after the war, and she was later the deported resister who touted the French nation which had not actively resisted. The counterpart of this memory is memory of Vichy collaboration in the Holocaust; this offers the worst of France to a recovered nation. The deported resisters’ narrative once engulfed the Holocaust experience, but deportation in France is now embodied by Jews deported by France (in the form of the Vichy regime) and the Jews’ particular experience of extermination. If the myth of a people in Resistance was shattered in the early 1970s, the same can be said of the myth of a community in deportation in which deported resisters’ postwar drive to separate themselves from those not deported for resistance activity was now critiqued in a new memory environment for differentiating themselves from deported Jews, while assimilating their victimhood.43 These contesting narratives, as well as the nature of the relationship of historians to their subjects of study, were raised by conflicts over the work of the historian Olga Wormser-Migot. Daughter of Jewish Russian Menshevik exiles to France, Wormser-Migot was trained as an historian. She worked for the Centre nationale d’Information sur les prisonniers de guerre in 1940-1941 and for the Ministère des Prisonniers de Guerre, Déportés, et Réfugiés from August 1944 until the summer of 1945. For the ministry, she interviewed French men and women returning from the camps and this experience became the basis 42

Annette Wieviorka, L’ère du témoin (Paris: Plon, 1998). Wieviorka is the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants. `My parents’, she wrote, ‘had not transmitted to me anything of Judaism except the wandering and the crematories. My roots had gone up in smoke at Auschwitz. You cannot shape a national identity in kneading the ashes’. L’écureuil de Chine (Paris: Les Presses d’aujourd’hui, 1979), 208. This led Wieviorka to seek another community. Before becoming the preeminent historian of the postwar memory of deportation of Jews from France, Wieviorka worked in China for Amitiés francochinoises during the final years of the Cultural Revolution, a movement itself directed at the destruction of a rich cultural heritage. See Donald Reid, `Pursuing the Communist Syndrome: Opening the Black Book of the New Anti-Communism in France’, International History Review 27 (June 2005): 306-308. 43 Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide, passim.

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of her academic career. After the war, Tillion turned her research from Algerian peasants to the camps; Wormser-Migot would make her study of eighteenthcentury female monarchs secondary to study of the camps. In the fall of 1945, Wormser-Migot began work in the secretariat of the Commission des déportés et internés politiques et raciaux, which included representatives from the principal camps, including Tillion for Ravensbrück. The Commission worked on a report which was to have appeared in 1947 (but was never published), that attributed two objectives to deportation—use of labor and extermination. Projecting the fate of Jews on all deportees, and the Resistance on the French, a people in resistance, the report went on to suggest that, if Liberation had not occurred, eventually all the French would have become candidates for deportation.44 Tillion was a member of the Réseau du souvenir of deported resisters and of the Sous-commission d’histoire de la Déportation of the Comité d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (CHDGM), composed of historians and deported resisters. These two groups were the impetus for the project to make Night and Fog. The Sous-commission designated Wormser-Migot and Henri Michel as historical consultants for the film. They had recently assembled an important anthology of survivors’ memoirs for the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps.45 Both the anthology and the film meld the camps and camp experiences, labor done at the camps and scenes of mass murder, without clearly differentiating the concentration camps and the extermination camps. 46 Wormser-Migot published her doctoral thesis, Le Système concentrationnaire Nazi (1933-1945), in 1968. She explained that the work did not start from the position of deportees judging a system to which they had been subjected, but from that of `a member of the SS concentration camp hierarchy, anxious to understand the system he was expected to apply’.47 SS officers in Wormser-Migot’s study lack the initiative Tillion sees them exercising, both in responding to directives during the war and defending themselves in postwar trials. Deportees had memories of camp life, but Wormser-Migot wrote of her 44

Ibid., 425. Henri Michel and Olga Wormser-Migot, Tragédie de la déportation, 1940-1945. Témoignages de survivants des camps de concentration allemands (Paris: Hachette, 1954). 46 The presentation of the camps in Night and Fog after March 1942 in terms of their economic contribution to the war effort owes a great deal to Wormser-Migot’s research. See her `Le travail concentrationnaire dans l’économie de guerre allemande’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 15-16 (July-September 1954): 81-98. However, Sylvie Lindeperg believes that Wormser-Migot was attempting to introduce the specificity of the Jewish extermination in Night and Fog, but was stymied by Jean Cayrol, author of the text for the film. Lindeperg, “Nuit et brouillard”, 37-41. 47 Olga Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire nazi (1933-1945) (Paris: P.U.F., 1968), 9. 45

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experience interviewing them on their return that they had their `erroneous certitudes’48; later, their memories were distorted into systematic coherence by the `popularization’ of the camps in trials and movies.49 Wormser-Migot therefore put aside survivors’ accounts like those she had collected in the anthology she had prepared with Michel. She based her thesis on extensive research in German archives and produced a pioneering work. Yet she was an historical actor as well, representative of the bureaucratic world of rational acts, the world unprepared deportees had reentered. Her job had required her to make sense of deportees’ seemingly delirious accounts in 1945: At the ministry, at the Lutétia [a hotel converted to process and care for returning deportees], in the hospitals, a dialogue of the deaf developed. We preserved the sense of a normal universe, of transfers of deportees in relation to the Allied advance, in one direction or another, in relation to bombed factories, the transports governed in the name of a Cartesian logic, when each account showed us that it was dismembered in the wind of the rout. We had the impression of taking on the impossible task of reconstituting the crazy wanderings drawn by the inhabitants of an anthill to which fire had been set. But the ants gauged us with all the disdain of the initiated in a world to which we did not have access. Blind strangers to a universe of the sighted, who tried and pretended to understand what they themselves had undergone without having ever understood it: this is what we represented for them. 50

Even after the first shock of the return passed, Wormser-Migot knew that as a contemporary of the returning deportees without their experience, she would never be part of their world. While Wormser-Migot never recognized her personal experience with returnees as a source, her memory of her experience in the Ministry suggests that this is where she developed uncertainty about returnees’ accounts that could not be validated by pre-Liberation archives. Returned deportees and those who spoke with them recognized that many false stories circulated about the camp experience. In 1954 Tillion wrote: Those [who lie] are, to tell the truth, much more numerous than one generally supposes, and a domain like the concentration-camp world—well made, unfortunately, for stimulating sado-masochist imaginations—offers them an exceptional field of action. We have known many mentally impaired individuals, half swindlers and half crazy, exploiting an imaginary deportation. We have known others—authentic deportees—whose sick minds try to go

48

Wormser-Migot, Le Retour des déportés, 212. Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire, 8. 50 Wormser-Migot, Le Retour des déportés, 212. 49

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Chapter Two beyond the monstrosities they have seen or about which they have been told and which happened.51

Tillion understood that after liberation, deportees could become unreliable witnesses, when `normal social life with its political positions, personal ties and innumerable considerations more or less foreign to care for the truth’ intervened.52 But this led Tillion not to mistrust survivors, but to deploy what she had learned of individuals in the camps, a knowledge available only to survivors. She speaks of the camps as places where one learned the importance of fiabilité (trustworthiness), of comrades upon whom one could count.53 Tillion trusted the extraordinary group of deported resisters with whom she had shared the camp experience and with whom she continued to work in ADIR after the war, and whose memories she assessed by comparing them. Tillion believed that oral history provided a necessary key to the history of the camps, given Nazi reluctance to speak clearly to themselves or others about what they were doing in the camps. This was a project that Tillion had begun at Ravensbrück. Prisoners fluent in German were assigned to keep records in the camps—the comptabilité délirante, toujours fausse which Jean Cayrol evokes in Night and Fog. They were usually political prisoners and sympathetic to those like Tillion identified as resisters by the NN on their dossiers.54 Women working in the offices or infirmary could at great risk do favors, like crossing names off lists and giving individual and collective warnings. And after the war, these women were an invaluable aid to interpretation of the coded language in which documents were written and to assessment of what errors in the records revealed about the administration of the camps. Tillion was an ethnologist whose research in Algeria had been done largely in the form of interviews and one frequently finds in her work sources evaluated as individuals dignes de confiance, a designation that would not have occurred to Wormser-Migot.55 Tillion explicitly wards off the cult of the document: `the most passionate account, the one swarming with 51 Tillion, `Réflexions sur l’étude’, 30. In 1950, Tillion and fellow Ravensbrück prisoner Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz testified for the defense at the trial of two German camp guards, accused by deportees of `imaginary crimes’. Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 14. 52 Germaine Tillion, `Le Système des camps de concentration’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 6 (April 1952): 58. 53 Tillion, À la recherche, 399 [2000]. 54 Tillion, La Traversée, 72. 55 Tillion wrote a defense of the memories of a few individuals deeply involved in an event as a source. Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 295-306. For Tillion, survivors dignes de confiances could be accurate historical sources of what happened, providing information unavailable elsewhere. This is different than the idea of survivors as memory sources engaged in preventing repression of what we know, but wish to ignore.

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the most errors, is without a doubt closer to the truth—less dangerous for it in any case—than the publication of archives….’56 Survivors are often valued as chroniclers of their own experience of an extreme situation others cannot know. For Tillion, however, prisoners before and after liberation are also invaluable analysts of how and why camps operated as they did, and only they could make sense of archival materials—for Ravensbrück, much of what remains was saved at great risk by prisoners—and of camp personnel’s trial testimony. Tillion herself took notes while in prison in France and at Ravensbrück, and was successful in keeping them until her liberation; she is the source in Night and Fog of the line `we succeeded in writing, in taking notes’ ; it is her writing on a clothe which is depicted in the film.57 In January 1944, `rabbits’—young Polish women subject to disfiguring medical experimentation at Ravensbrück—who had stolen a camera, confided undeveloped film taken of their scarred legs to Tillion, who kept it hidden in dirty rags in her pocket, and smuggled it out of the camp in April 1945. Tillion did not experience her rapid shift from camp inmate to historian of the camps in 1945 as a break. Based on information provided by prisoners working in the camp office, Tillion gave a `veritable university class’ to NN and other prisoners in March 1944 on what she had deduced about the operation of Ravensbrück as a profitable enterprise for Himmler that culminated in extermination of prisoners by labor. To take apart a mechanism (even one which crushes you), to envisage clearly, and in all its details, a situation (even desperate), is a powerful source of sangfroid, of serenity and of the strength of the soul. There is nothing more frightening than the absurd. In hunting down phantoms, I was conscious of helping a little, morally, the best among us.58

After the war, a shared interpretation of how the camp functioned furthered the bonds formed by deported resisters at Ravensbrück. The extraordinary intensity of camp life made the ADIR a community of memory and Tillion never experienced a conflict between this memory and her historical work. NN prisoners like Tillion had been particularly isolated from France. They had been denied the right to communicate with the outside world. In postwar France, reference to NN became code for the unfinished struggle with the Nazis over memory. Deportees wanted to make known what they could not make known to the French while they were in the camps. Only in so doing could those who had been made to vanish in the night and fog during the war, reveal the camp world 56

Tillion, `Réflexions sur l’étude’, 37. Raskin, Nuit et brouillard, 101; Lindeperg, “Nuit et brouillard”, 58. 58 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 49. Tillion, À la recherche, 37 [1978]. 57

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that threatened to recede in the night and fog after the war. De Gaulle Anthonioz wrote, `At the depths of our misery we wanted passionately, more than to return, to make known the truth about the camps…. And it would be the last victory of the Nazis if [this truth] disappears forever “in the night and in the fog”’.59 The community of deported resisters recognized itself in the narrative of extermination Tillion provided and deported resisters frequently repeated it.60 In Le Système concentrationnaire, Wormser-Migot cast doubt on the existence of gas chambers in any of the western camps, including Mauthausen and Ravensbrück.61 In so doing, she put aside survivors’ accounts to which she had been faithful earlier in favor of her own voice. Wormser-Migot was aware of accounts of the gas chamber at Ravensbrück functioning in February-March 1945, having presented it unquestioningly in an essay co-written in 194662 and published a camp survivor’s discussion of the gas chamber at Ravensbrück in her co-edited anthology.63 However, she now found it `inexplicable’, raising questions about who would have ordered it built and why. Wormser-Migot could find no satisfactory archival evidence for gas chambers in western camps. She critiqued the testimony given by SS officers at their trials, and suggested that deportees at Ravensbrück had invented the story of a gas chamber after hearing of them from Auschwitz evacuees in January 1945. 64 Wormser-Migot explained accounts of the gas chamber at Mauthausen as the result of confusion between a gas chamber and a crematory, but also of `an unconscious desire of revaluation of the hardships endured with respect to the Jewish deportees’.65 ‘“We too had our gas chamber”’, Mauthausen deportees wanted to say: The term “gas chamber” begins to be one of the leitmotifs of the chanson de geste of deportation for the Jews—with reason—[and] for the non-Jews in the

59

Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], `La condition des enfants au camp de Ravensbrück’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 45 (January 1962): 82. 60 Ibid, 72. 61 Accounts of gas chambers at other Western camps, including Buchenwald, had been previously disproved. 62 Olga Wormser-Migot and A. Jacob, `Essai historique’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 207-208. 63 Michel and Wormser-Migot, Tragédie de la Déportation, 409-411. 64 Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire, 541-544. 65 Ravensbrück prisoner Micheline Maurel was sent to work for twenty months at a metallurgical plant in Neubrandenburg. In her memoir of her time there, Un camp très ordinaire, she refers to Neubrandenburg as a `very ordinary camp’, because it did not have a gas chamber.

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name of a quite complex process, at the heart of which the psychologist and the psychoanalyst would have to shore up the historian’s conclusions.66

The insider/outsider status of Wormser-Migot in the world of deportees made her mistrustful of what she saw as non-Jewish deportees’ potential for aggrandizing delusion. She pitted her interpretation of contemporary documents against the testimony of surviving deportees. Wormser-Migot’s sally can be interpreted as an early effort to reclaim the particularity of the Jewish experience of extermination from attempts to incorporate it in a narrative of deportation developed after the war in which deported resisters were at the vanguard. We have no evidence to explain Wormser-Migot’s accusation other than what making the accusation itself might reveal about her. Wormser-Migot was a Communist fellow traveler in the early 1950s, the era when the party provided an inclusive account of deportation, which downplayed the different experiences of the deported.67 Wormser-Migot moved away from the party in 1956, the year of the release of Night and Fog.68 Distancing herself from the party narrative, did Wormser-Migot herself feel ‘an unconscious desire’ to challenge the deported resisters with whom she had worked for more than twenty years, who had an experience and an authority she, as a non-deportee studying deportation, would never have? Sylvie Lindeperg writes that Wormser-Migot seems to have lived through the Occupation like ‘a salamander’, never forced to confront her `effaced Judaism’.69 Yet, although Wormser-Migot did not discuss being Jewish in her unpublished memoirs or elsewhere, was she calling on this identity—that which she possessed that most deported resisters did not—when she questioned the accounts of deported resisters?

66 Wormser-Migot, Le Système concentrationnaire, 12-13. Tillion developed a psychology of camp administrators to explain changes in their behavior and inconsistencies in their postwar accounts; Wormser-Migot turned to psychology to explain elements of survivors’ postwar accounts for which she could not find corroborating evidence in wartime records. 67 Wormser-Migot’s early work has elements of what Vidal-Naquet referred to as a marxisme à l’état sauvage in Tillion’s initial study: ‘The economic aspect of the concentration [camps] clarifies singularly… the purely commercial [mercantile] goals [of the Nazi regime] which the ideological discourse of the leaders most often disguised’. Wormser-Migot, `Le travail concentrationnaire’, 82. 68 Lindeperg, “Nuit et Brouillard”, 25, 245. 69 Ibid., 18.

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The ADIR board reacted to Wormser-Migot’s charges by asking Tillion to respond point by point to Wormser-Migot.70 The French Jewish survivor and historian of the camps, Georges Wellers, thought the filles de Ravensbrück were quite hard on Wormser-Migot, but deservedly so.71 For Tillion and other deportees the existence of gas chambers was not an abstruse question of historical fact: Quite a few of us had taken real risks so that the truth would leave the pits where everything had been so meticulously arranged so that it would remain buried. We had gone so far as to think that our poor lives were nothing in comparison to the value we attached to the cry of truth that, from the bottom of abyss, must 72 awaken God.

Tillion and colleagues in and out of the ADIR wrote several well-researched and compellingly argued essays and books that established conclusively that prisoners at Ravensbrück had known of the gas chambers at Auschwitz well before January 1945 and that there had been gas chambers at Mauthausen and Ravensbrück. Their use of a diversity of contemporary documentation refuted Wormser-Migot in the very terms of documentation vs. survivors’ memories in which she had framed the debate.73 But precisely because the gas chamber had become a leitmotif of Jewish deportation accounts, Wormser-Migot’s real challenge was to the deported resister narrative. Pierre Vidal-Naquet aptly refers to the `local patriotisms’ at play in this conflict between partisans of a single

70

Wormser-Migot and Tillion read documentation differently. Wormser-Migot is correct that the Ravensbrück commandant Fritz Suhren wrongly testified that he stopped directing the camp in February 1945, but Tillion takes this not as a reason to reject use of his testimony, but as evidence that Suhren was seeking to avoid responsibility for direction of the camp while the gas chamber was in operation in February-March 1945, knowing that this would damn him. Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 116-117. 71 Folco, `Dans Un Champ de Mines’, 72. 72 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 18. 73 See the appendices in ibid., 329-467, 481-487; and Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein and Adelbert Rückerl, Les Chambres à gaz, secret d’État (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984). To appreciate the particularity of Tillion’s account of Ravensbrück, premised on the extermination through labor narrative and culminating in the operation of gas chambers, compare it to the non-survivor Jack G. Morrison’s Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939-45 (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publications, 2000). Morrison accepts the existence of gas chambers at Ravensbrück, but does not build his account toward their operation.

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narrative of differentiated extermination like Tillion and those who presented differentiated narratives of extermination and exploitation.74 Fifteen to twenty times as many people were murdered daily at Auschwitz in 1944 as in the `artisanal extermination’ at Ravensbrück75 and its adjoining camps at the height of the killing there in 1945, wrote Tillion, but, she asked in 1988, when French resisters were killed not for their actions, but because of their appearance—her mother was selected for her white hair—was this not the `essence of “racism”’?76 Tillion’s comrade at Ravensbrück, Anise Postel-Vinay, explained that `there was not a difference in principle’ between camps with exceptionally high mortality like Auschwitz and those in the west where prisoners were worked to death and subject to elimination in the final months of the war by newly-arrived `technicians of gassings from Auschwitz’, but ‘simply’, from Auschwitz to camps like Ravenbrück, `a difference in the degree of cruelty, desired from the beginning’.77 Searching for a way to present the relationship of camps like Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, Tillion explained that one needs `to underscore among the diverse camps not the resemblances [similitudes] (they weren’t alike), but their parallelism’.78 For Tillion, the movement of camp personnel and prisoners from east to west in the final months of the war nourished a culture and practices of extermination among camp administrators in the west, not a covetous desire among deportees in western camps to claim falsely the presence in their camps of the gas chambers found in eastern extermination camps.

74 Vidal-Naquet, `Réflexions’, 204. For conflicts among survivor communities, see JeanMichel Chaumont, La Concurrence des victimes: génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). 75 Germaine Tillion, L’Afrique bascule vers l’avenir (Paris: Éditions Tirésias, 1999), 22n1. 76 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 190, 248. Tillion contends that in 1943-44, when Ravensbrück was first and foremost oriented to industrial production, the SS there shifted their most active hatred from Jews and Poles to French and Russians, recalcitrant workers. Ibid., 197-198. 77 Anise Postel-Vinay recognized that Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec were rail terminuses with gas chambers. They `were centers of collective assassinations and not camps’ (and therefore implicitly fell outside the debate over the inclusion of all camps within a single narrative). `L’extermination dans les camps “ordinaires”. L’exemple de Ravensbrück’, Voix et Visages 208 (January-February 1988). For deported resisters like Postel-Vinay and Tillion, the fact that a small percentage of those who arrived at Auschwitz and Lublin-Maïdanek were not sent immediately to the gas chambers, but were initially assigned to labor before being murdered, made these camps extreme variants of concentration camps in the west like Ravensbrück. 78 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 23.

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As long as the Holocaust had been cast within the deportation narrative presented by deported resisters, the leading Holocaust denier in France, Paul Rassinier, came from the ranks of deported resisters. He began with rejection, correct in these cases, of accounts of the existence of gas chambers in camps in the west where he had been held, Buchenwald and Dora.79 But in the dialectic that characterizes the Vichy Syndrome, a new generation of Holocaust negationists emerged in the late 1970s who spoke not from camp experience, but from an obsessive form of scholarly skepticism. Holocaust denial begins with the premise that the public has been deluded into remembering something which never happened and argues not that extermination encompassed both camps for Jews and camps for other deportees, if in very different rhythms, but the inverse, that all camps were labor camps without the goal of extermination. However, the prologue to debates about the existence of gas chambers in the extermination camps was the historian Wormser-Migot’s effort to delineate the particular experience of deported Jews from that of other deportees. 80

79

Florent Brayard, Comment l’idée vint à M. Rassinier. Naissance du révisionnisme (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 80 Like Wormser-Migot, the child of Menshevik exiles, Annette Wieviorka is the child of immigrants cut off from their native land and carriers of a tradition with no future. (On Wieviorka, see p. 23n42 above.) Wieviorka portrays deported resisters’ criticism of Wormser-Migot as unfairly `assassinating definitively’ Le Système concentrationnaire, which she sees as a major work in line with those of Lucy Dawidowicz and Raul Hilberg. Le Monde, 8 August 2002 (Annette Wieviorka). Wieviorka rejects Tillion’s analysis of both Auschwitz and Ravensbrück in terms of extermination, since extermination was the goal from the point of arrest only for Jews and Roma. If a narrative of extermination can be constructed in light of the horrendous final months of the western camps for other deportees, the narrative of extermination told and enacted by the Nazis earlier in the war concerned Jews and Roma. Wieviorka does not accept that, because some were selected at Auschwitz to work before extermination, and that a gas chamber was built and operated at Ravensbrück, this makes the histories of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück `parallel’. Pointing to other deportees’ incorrect affirmations of gas chambers at camps like Buchenwald, Wieviorka suggests that Wormser-Migot was on the right path, although wrong to deny the existence of gas chambers at Mauthausen and Ravensbrück. Wieviorka sees Tillion’s interpretation of the gas chamber as an effort not to co-opt the details of Auschwitz, which Wormser-Migot had accused her of doing, but as an attempt to graft Ravensbrück on the Auschwitz narrative. Wieviorka does not question that Tillion learned of Auschwitz at Ravensbrück well before the arrival of Auschwitz prisoners in 1945, but sees Tillion writing history that remains true to misleading impressions about Auschwitz as a hybrid labor camp/extermination center which she believes Tillion acquired at Ravensbrück and never abandoned. Déportation et génocide, 199-204.

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While neither Wormser-Migot nor her critics among deported resisters questioned the existence of gas chambers used to exterminate Jews, 81 Holocasut deniers Robert Faurisson and Serge Thion took Wormser-Migot’s challenge to the existence of gas chambers in the West as suggesting that the existence of gas chambers in any camp was open to doubt.82 Faurisson claims that his interest in gas chambers in the camps was fed by an article he read in Die Zeit in August 1960 that cited historical research as saying (like Wormser-Migot later) that there had been no gas chambers in camps within the borders of the old German Reich, including Ravensbrück.83 Faurisson took the title of his well-known negationist article, `The Problem of the Gas Chambers’, from the section on gas chambers in western camps in Wormser-Migot’s book. Faurisson’s lawyer cited Wormser-Migot both in his claim that the Ravensbrück adjunct commander had been hung for a crime he did not commit—operating a gas chamber—and in his defense of Faurisson when he was charged with breaking the Gayssot law, which banned negationist statements.84 Deported resisters responded by using the freighted term `negation’ to refer to Wormser-Migot’s `negation’ of gas chambers in all of the western camps and the citation of her work by Holocaust deniers.85 Tillion’s rebuttal of Wormser-Migot led Tillion to serve as president of the Association pour l’étude des assassinats par gaz sous le régime nationalsocialiste, founded in April 1982 in response to the need for historical material to counter Faurisson in court. And, in turn, some of those concerned with forwarding recognition of the particularity of the Jewish experience could not resist Wormser-Migot’s charge. Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, made known that he did not believe there had been gas chambers in Ravensbrück or any other camps within the borders of Germany. Holocaust deniers latched on

81

See Olga Wormser-Migot’s heated attack on negationists: Assez Mentir! (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1979). 82 Serge Thion, Vérité historique ou vérité politique? Le dossier de l’affaire Faurisson. La question des chambres à gaz (Paris: Éditions La Vieille Taupe, 1980). 83 Michel Folco, `La Révision de l’extermination’, Zéro 7 (April 1987): 56. Faurisson’s genealogy of his interest as dating from the reading of an article in 1960 is open to the kind of skeptical readings he gives to Holocaust documentation. 84 Anise Postel-Vinay, `Un dernier devoir: écrire l’Histoire. L’assassinat par les chambres à gaz sous le régime nazi’, Voix et Visages 182 (November–December 1982): 1; Collectif de la Revue d’histoire révisionniste, `Procès Faurisson’, Revue d’histoire révisionniste 4 (February-April 1991): 107-133. Tillion was not immune to Faurisson’s combing of literature on the camps to support his skepticism. He quoted Tillion’s 1954 warning about fabricated camp stories in `Un Grand Faux Témoin: Élie Wiesel’, Annales d’histoire révisionniste 4 (Spring 1988): 163-168. 85 Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, `Les chambres à gaz, secret d’État’, Voix et Visages 186 (July-October 1983): 3.

Chapter Two

34

to his comment, but he left unanswered the public letter Tillion sent to him on the issue.86 *

*

*

A syndrome is a psychological concept conceived for the individual that Rousso has applied to a collectivity. But Tillion’s experience encourages us to reflect back on the `unfinished mourning’ of the individual. Tillion had been in the camp hospital when her mother, Émilie Tillion, was taken to the gas chamber. Her initial response to the devastating news was guilt that she had been caring for herself rather than looking out for her mother, as she had done since her mother’s arrival at Ravensbrück. Tillion `was so upset that to understand the incoherent pieces of information she was starting to get [about the site where her mother had died], she started to note benchmark dates`.87 Without admitting it at the time, she `was trying desperately to learn more about the assassination of [her] mother’.88 The Swedish Red Cross, which had negotiated the release of prisoners from Ravensbrück, kept them in a recovery center for several weeks. There Tillion began taking a census, car-by-car, barrack-by-barrack, bed-by-bed, which created a control she would later use to assess survivor testimony, once again without particular reference to her mother. `In registering all this, I was thinking only of our dead, of their families and of the anguish of not being able, even in thought, to follow in their last moments those whom we loved. This anguish, I shared. I still share it’.89 `I was in mourning’, Tillion wrote in 1987, `and I then took advantage of this big assembly [300 deportees] with intact memories to gather what they conserved of all that we had lost’.90 Tillion’s technique was to look for the couple of 86

Tillion, À la recherche, 154, 185-186 [1986]. Lanzmann has a history of disrespecting Tillion. He was one of Simone de Beauvoir’s dinner companions in 1958 who agreed that Tillion’s court testimony to save FLN leader Yacef Saâdi’s life was a saloperie. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 462. Tillion also told Michel Folco that Serge Klarsfeld, a preeminent figure in revealing the history of the Holocaust in France, did not believe there had been a gas chamber at Ravensbrück. `Dans Un Champ de Mines’, 72. 87 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 31. In the `universe of uncertainty and shadows’ of the camps, `benchmarks in space and time were lacking’ and efforts to note dates or consult a map, at the threat to one’s life, `could only be isolated in the midst of the immensity of the Terra incognita engulfed in the night’. After liberation, the camps `became outlined among the phantoms of the “historical dimension”, but they were rejoining them without baggage, naked like the dead’. Ibid., 304. 88 `Germaine Tillion’ [interview with Irène Michine], 21. 89 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 299. 90 Ibid., 11.

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prisoners in each car who struck everyone’s attention91 and to use this information to make an accurate accounting. Within the camp, numerous memoirs (but not Tillion’s account) make clear that Émilie Tillion was one of these exceptional individuals.92 Tillion handled the data she collected in a scientific, impersonal way, like the ethnologist she had been when compiling family genealogies of others’ families in the Aurès. A few years later, Tillion used similar techniques to analyze a nominal list of the 27000 transport, preserved by a Czech prisoner assigned to work in the camp offices. The convoy had brought more than nine hundred Frenchwomen to Ravensbrück, including her mother. Although Émilie Tillion does not appear in Tillion’s published research, her mother’s presence, she can now acknowledge, `was evidently the reason that I began the census of the 27000 transport’.93 Looking back on her first account of Ravensbrück published in 1946, Tillion wrote, `that which concerned me most deeply wasn’t found there. I didn’t yet feel capable of speaking of it. My excuse was that I wanted to show what had been the lot of all, and that I believed I could do it in abstract terms’.94 The account is marked by the contrast between detailed, often prosecutorial, portraits of individual camp guards and officers95, and the presentation of fellow inmates in quite broad, impersonal terms. Annette Wieviorka reports that no camp returnees published proportionately as many memoirs as those from

91

Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 228. `She was marvelously French’. Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], `In Memoriam’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 168. See also Maisie Renault, La Grande Misère (Paris: Chavane, 1948), 33, 37-38; Margaret Buber, Under Two Dictators, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1949), 306; Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Victoire en pleurant (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1981), 299-300, 323; Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, ‘Grete Neumann’, Liberté de l’esprit 4 (May 1949): 74; Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, La Traversée de la nuit (Paris; Seuil, 1998), 19; Anise Postel-Vinay, ‘A Young Frenchwoman’s Wartime Experiences’, The Dachau Review 1 (1985): 230; Paulette Don Zimmet in Wormser and Michel, eds., Tragédie de la Déportation, 257-58; Rémy, Mémoires d’un agent secret de la France libre (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1967), IV:61-62, V:206-207; and Wormser-Migot, Le Retour des déportés, 151. 93 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 285. 94 Ibid., 24-32. 95 Himmler, whose SS administered the camps, remains at the heart of Tillion’s analyses of the camps, rather than Hitler. For the Holocaust narrative, a focus on Hitler the masterful anti-semitic politician is the key, whereas in the deported resister narrative, culminating in the confluence of racial extermination and extermination by labor in 1945, Himmler is the central figure. Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 193-196. 92

36

Chapter Two

Ravensbrück, but Tillion’s account lacked their self-exploration. She later described her 1946 account as `stripped of all that seemed to me personal’.96 However, Tillion did remain closely tied to resisters who had been deported to Ravensbrück, and she assumed what one can see as the responsibility of the deportee through ADIR, for which she served as one of the vice-presidents from 1954 to 1963. ADIR was born of a project begun at Ravensbrück by a couple of deported resisters, including Tillion’s mother, none of whom returned. Émilie Tillion had suggested the idea of an Association des Déportées, an affirmation of a world after the camp and recognition that deportees would need the community some had managed to forge to survive in the camp in the post-camp world as well. The prescient Émilie Tillion further recognized that resisters who survived deportation would be able to draw upon their experiences to offer new moral and political perspectives in the postwar world. She had secretly written to a sick young French prisoner in the barracks where those with contagious diseases were held: `Outside of the great, the imperious reasons we have to be here, I am convinced that we are finding here an extraordinary expansion of our horizons, in all the orders of ideas, of unsuspected possibilities’.97 In 1954, Tillion allowed herself to ask why individuals like her mother had been killed, without alluding to her by name. There had been no need for mass killing. Food was available and work needed to be done: Why was this crime and this idiocy perpetuated, so uniformly from the east to the west of Nazi Germany? One should not lose sight that a camp like Ravensbrück was a very prosperous industrial enterprise. To annex a camp of invalids presented only one inconvenience: it would slightly diminish the profit margin. We think this was the argument that tipped destiny’s balance.98

Despite the flood of new prisoners and disruptions in the arrival of primary materials, `the housing and feeding of these useless women did not pose insoluble problems, but everything happened as if, among the solutions which offered themselves, only one was envisaged by the camp commander: extermination’.99 But it was only after attacking Wormser-Migot’s challenge to the narrative in which her mother’s death came as the culmination of the project of extermination from camps in the east to those in the west, that Tillion spoke openly of her mother’s death and its effect on her.100 If the deported resister 96

Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 12. de Gaulle [Anthonioz], `In Memoriam’, 169 98 Tillion, `Réflexions sur l’étude’, 4. 99 Ibid., 16. See also Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 189. 100 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 7-28. In Tillion’s `A la recherche’ of 1946, the martyrdom of the French at Ravensbrück is presented as evidence of their moral 97

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narrative did not give expression to the particularity of the Jewish experience, only the struggle to defend it allowed Tillion to express her particular grief. The Vichy Syndrome has focused on French collaboration in the Holocaust, but in so doing it contested the narrative of deported resisters, who had tied their experience to that of deported Jews, without questioning the French nation for which they had fought. The shared extermination narrative secures the place of camps like Ravensbrück, even as the dominant element in accounts of the camps has shifted from resistance to victimhood. If the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome are primarily a phenomenon of generations which came of age after the war, examination of Tillion’s responses to expressions of the Syndrome reveals the ways in which it could evoke for the wartime generation both collective reassertions of credos honed during the war and individual reassessments of the place of life experiences in the expression of these credos in the decades after the war.

superiority to other nationalities. But this displacement of homage for her mother of whom she cannot yet speak is absent from the next edition of Ravensbrück (1973), in which Tillion speaks openly of her grief for her mother—and of her realization during the Algerian War that no national citizenry is immune from the worst in human nature.

CHAPTER THREE FROM RAVENSBRÜCK TO ALGIERS AND NOISY-LE-GRAND: THE DIALOGUES WITH DEPORTATION OF GERMAINE TILLION AND GENEVIÈVE DE GAULLE ANTHONIOZ

[It was] the opposite of what happened for me from 1940 to 1945, —I know in advance the range of what could happen [in Algeria], I knew it at each instant, and I saw with a certain vision [coloration] that is not that of theory…. In my opinion, experience is not without use in guiding the imagination—at least when one leaves one’s self [on sort de soi-même]. —Germaine Tillion1 The same as when we were deported to the concentration camps, we were the best placed to know what Nazism was, the poor are today the first resisters because they are the ones who experience first the totalitarianism of money in our time. The poor know better than anyone what is social exclusion. They are the first resisters because there are more and more who stand up to the deprivation of fundamental rights. These rights they lack, they know better than those who exercise them. They give us an example of extraordinary courage. —Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz2 ATD Quart Monde is the purist of the pure of the Resistance that remains for us…. Are we the SS who keep these women, these men and these children in the extermination camp of their conditions? This last cry appears to me more authentic and loyal [than ‘We are all German Jews’]. —Michel Serres3

An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in French Politics, Culture & Society 22:3 (Fall 2004): 1-24. (© Berghahn Books Inc., 2004). Permission to reprint has been granted by Berghahn Books Inc. 1 Germaine Tillion, À la recherche du vrai et du juste, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 259, 262 [1964]. The original publication date for materials from this collection is given here in brackets. In the notes below, dates in parentheses specify the edition of the text being cited. 2 Caroline Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz (Paris: Plon, 1997), 209.

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Faced with a troubled past, national collectivities can negotiate identities through iconic figures. Prescient hero Charles de Gaulle and Resistance martyr Jean Moulin played this role in France in the decades following World War II. Since 1968, as France has confronted repressed elements of the Occupation experience, other individuals from this era, like Marc Bloch, have come to the fore as exemplary figures through whom the French can enact reconciliation with their nation’s wartime history. Germaine Tillion is another historian and heroic resister whose life narrative has emerged in recent years as a privileged site for the French to deal not only with the traumas of the Occupation, but with those of the French-Algerian War as well. An ethnologist working under the direction of Marcel Mauss and Louis Massignon in the Aurès from 1934 to 1940, Tillion returned to France and played an active role in the Resistance from June 1940 until her arrest in 1942.4 Deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp the following year, she was not released until April 1945. Tillion’s comrade at Ravensbrück, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, played a similar role in postwar France, asking the French to confront the creation of outcastes and their fate during the war—and offering them a chance to do so today.5 In the years since the trial of Maurice Papon in 1997 put forth a narrative of moral compromise during the Occupation and the French-Algerian War, Tillion has, through no choice of her own, assumed the guise of the antiPapon: the Gaullist who resisted from the beginning of the war and never compromised with Vichy, who was sent to a concentration camp rather than signing off on the deportation of others, and who fought the French republic’s inhumane practices in Algeria during the French-Algerian War instead of extending them to Paris. Tillion’s signature on the petition asking for Papon’s liberation from prison on medical grounds affirmed her status as the anti-Papon, doing for him what few believe he would have done for others. Tillion is and de Gaulle Anthonioz was, until her death in 2002, among a group of deported resisters who serve as a national moral conscience, seeking to assure the protection of human rights in France.6

3

Michel Serres, `La boîte noire de la misère’, Le Monde, 28 November 2001. For Tillion’s Resistance world, see À la recherche, 67-149; Julien Blanc, `Le réseau du Musée de l’Homme’, Esprit 388 (February 2000): 89-103; Martin Blumenson, The Vildé Affair: Beginnings of the French Resistance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); and Visages de la Résistance (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1987), 237-253, 329-341. 5 Geneviève de Gaulle added the name Anthonioz when she married after the war. She is referred to by her married name, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, in the text. 6 One example is Tillion’s service in 1996 with fellow deported resister Stéphane Hessel on the `college of mediators’, which sought to open dialogue between the sans papiers, 4

40

Chapter Three

Tillion has recently been the subject of a book of interviews and an admiring biography by France’s preeminent biographer Jean Lacouture7, long an admirer of Tillion’s heroïsme gai,8 as well as of works of moral philosophy by Tzvetan Todorov, for whom Tillion is ‘the living incarnation of the best this century produced` and `has acquired the status of a sage`.9 Todorov tells us that when he doesn’t know what decision to make or how to respond to a situation, he often asks himself, `What would Germaine do?`10 Todorov first discussed Tillion in his pathbreaking study of concentration camp memoirs, Face à l’extrême, which posited a division between the `ordinary virtues` of dignity and caring—acts undertaken to benefit individuals with whom the caregiver has some relationship—and the impersonal and often inhuman `heroic virtues` of ideologies. The revolutions of 1789 and 1917 established clear narratives of `heroic virtues` that constituted the stuff of history, leaving `ordinary virtue` an ahistorical feminine-gendered entity. But, since 1989, these narratives of `heroic virtue` have ebbed. We live in a vacuum, but it is a vacuum in which the `ordinary virtues` are all the more important. In Face à l’extrême, Todorov argued that `heroic virtue` has been sustained by a kind of narrative missing from accounts of `ordinary virtue`.11 His recent essays on Tillion can be read as an effort to create the individual narrative of a hero of `ordinary virtue`.12 Neither Lacouture nor Todorov is a disinterested chronicler of Tillion’s life. Lacouture came of age with the Occupation. He expresses shame at having failed to join the Resistance earlier.13 Lacouture responded by engaging in the struggle against colonialism and by writing biographies of heroic individuals like de Gaulle—his first book on de Gaulle was dedicated to his Gaullist mother, who wanted him to join the Free French—and Germaine Tillion. Todorov expresses contrition for his unthinking participation in a repressive social order as a youth in Communist Bulgaria and contrasts his father with his

foreign residents of France who lacked the proper papers to remain, and the government. See Stéphane Hessel, Danse avec le siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 7 Germaine Tillion, La Traversée du mal. Entretien avec Jean Lacouture (Paris: Arléa, 1997); Jean Lacouture, Le Témoignage est un combat (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 8 Jean Lacouture, Enquête sur l’auteur (Paris: Arléa, 1989), 285. 9 Tzvetan Todorov, `Avant-propos’ to Tillion, À la recherche, 7. 10 Tzvetan Todorov, `Une Ethnologue dans la cité’, in Christian Bromberger and Tzvetan Todorov, Germaine Tillion. Un Ethnologue dans le siècle (Arles: Actes Sud, 2002), 9. 11 Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigal Pollak (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 12-13, 24, 47-54. 12 Tzvetan Todorov, `Avant-Propos’, 7-26; `Une Ethnologue’, 9-32; Mémoire du mal. Tentation du bien. Enquête sur le siècle (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000), 311-329. Todorov dedicated Mémoire du mal to Tillion. 13 Jean Lacouture, Profession biographe (Paris: Hachette, 2003), 33.

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mother, who emerges as a practitioner of `ordinary virtue`.14 For more than a decade, Todorov has devoted himself to study of individuals who refused to conform in the face of injustice. What has made Tillion such an appealing figure to Lacouture, Todorov, and many French men and women is not solely her moral qualities, but her dialogues with the lived experience of deportation as a means to confront and master new situations. After the war, as France emerged from defeat, both Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz moved from fending off the enemy’s interrogations to daring to interrogate the nation they loved. Tillion wrote in 1974 that ethnology occupies a position at the level of reciprocal knowledge among peoples comparable to that of dialogue at the individual level: a ceaseless two-way movement of thought, ceaselessly corrected. In dialogue, as in ethnology, there are two participants: an interlocutor (an unknown person, an unknown people) and, opposite, another being, the one you know both best and least. The dialogue gets under way, the shuttle flies to and fro, and each oscillation changes something—not just on one side, but on both: for what the interlocutor perceives about himself is what his partner does not see, and vice versa. But conversely, each sees in himself what the other fails to notice….Thus ethnology is first and foremost a dialogue with another culture. Then a questioning of oneself and the other. Then, if possible, a confrontation that goes beyond oneself and the other… 15 [to the] notion of the unity of the human race….

For `the rules of observation one applies to neighbors can, with profit, be used to observe oneself. But first one has to have thought to look at oneself’.16 Tillion brought intuitions from her wartime experience to analysis of Algeria after her return there in 1954 and, in turn, her experience in Algeria after 1954 gave her new insights into French experience during the war. Just as one cannot psychoanalyze oneself, `one cannot do an ethnography of oneself, quite simply because one cannot see oneself without a mirror, and this mirror is essentially, necessarily, the knowledge of a foreign society, a different society`.17 Or, as she wrote in the heat of the French-Algerian War, `To understand one civilization properly, one must know at least two—and deeply`.18 As an ethnographer, 14

Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 30, 80 Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins: Women’s Oppression in Mediterranean Society, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Al Saqi Books, 1983), 9-10. Or, in the words of an admiring Lacouture, `ethnology can also be an immediate therapy’. Enquête, 288. 16 Tillion, À la recherche, 303 [1974]. 17 Ibid., 305. 18 Germaine Tillion, France and Algeria, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 177-178. 15

Chapter Three

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Tillion studied rural Algeria and later Ravensbrück. The French were absent from her prewar study of Algeria and initially present only as an ideal type at Ravensbrück, but the French-Algerian War brought a questioning of this French essence and its radical differentiation from the German other. What came to concern Tillion was the relationship, the dialectic of dialogue. `I am today convinced`, she told an interviewer in 1977, `that what counts between individuals is not me or the other, but the relation between the two. Only the tissues of relations are really important`.19 .

*

*

*

Proportionate to the number of deportees, female resisters sent to Ravensbrück were among the most productive memoir writers among French deportees in the first years after the war.20 Ravensbrück camp memoirs told of resistance to the degradation that was at the core of the camp world and of prisoners’ acts of solidarity, a dialectic of extraordinary inhumanity and humanity. De Gaulle Anthonioz saw in her fellow prisoners the face of the suffering Christ21; `it was the destruction of our soul which was the program of the univers concentrationnaire’.22 She described her block at Ravensbrück as ‘the third world’ of the camp.23 Resistance to dehumanization in the camps drew upon the practices that Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz performed as resisters—organizing, information gathering, and interceding with authorities for clemency—but was a form of resistance distinct from the extra-mural resistance that had brought de Gaulle Anthonioz and Tillion to Ravensbrück: `We knew another resistance, another combat’, wrote de Gaulle Anthonioz.24 It was a resistance whose contribution to France would come with its narration after the war: spreading information, sharing food and smuggling clothes from the booty wagons sorted at the camps contributed more to an overarching postwar moral narrative than to the war’s resolution. 19

Gilles Anquetil, `Femmes de Kabylie: Un entretien avec Germaine Tillion’, Nouvelles littéraires, 4-11 August 1977, 7. Analogy is another important rhetorical device in Tillion’s work. In Les Ennemis complémentaires, she explores French-Canadian history and culture to suggest it shared traits with both French Algerian and Muslim Algerian experience, a way of evoking the complementarity of the then warring populations. 20 Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide: Entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992). 21 Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, ‘Grete Neumann’, Liberté de l’esprit 4 (May 1949): 74. 22 Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, La Traversée de la nuit (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 18. 23 Frédérique Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 86. 24 Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], ‘Préface’ to Élisabeth Terrenoire, Combattantes sans uniforme (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1946), 6.

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Returning deported French resisters condemned the abased German camp staff for what the camps revealed about Germany, but praised the qualities exhibited by the interned French, especially the resisters. Ravensbrück memoirs encoded a particular female contribution to French recovery. Tillion had been saved by `the coalition of friendship`,25 and France could be as well. Suffering made male prisoners more hardened or cruel, but, Tillion observed, `personal suffering inordinately increased [women prisoners’] care and concern for others`.26 `It seems to me that in the women’s camps, the appui amical was more constant, solid and widespread`;27 women were not crippled by political divisions, as the male deportees were.28 The memoirs themselves were an act of self-recovery. Although returning deportees faced the desire of those at home not to hear their stories (because deportees’ suffering could shame them and trump their own stories of loss), —deported resisters participated in the Resistance narrative of making their heroic experience material with which to further national recovery.29 The underlying premise of the memoirs was that the camps did not create or teach virtue so much as solicit virtuous behavior from individuals whose social, political and cultural character when they entered the camps predisposed them to act nobly. The French were among the lowest in the camp hierarchy at Ravensbrück: they were late arrivals; few knew German and they therefore could not get office assignments. Ignored by the French Red Cross, few received packages of food from home. It was these factors and not some national character flaw, Tillion determined while at Ravensbrück, that explained the high mortality of the French. For Tillion, writing in 1946, It must be recognized that we were, almost organically, on the wrong side of the camp: the SS discipline… had the gift of making the French bristle with rage…. Our faults played a role equal to our virtues, for our bad elements (prostitutes, volunteers to work in Germany) were unusable because of their chronic indiscipline, but also because of their repugnance at informing and servility,

25

Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 33. Germaine Tillion, `Le Système des camps de concentration’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 6 (April 1952): 63. 27 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 213. 28 Germaine Tillion, `À la recherche de la vérité’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 42-43. 29 Deportee Louis François wrote in his preface to Ravensbrück deportee Maisie Renault’s La Grande Misère (Paris: Chavane, 1948), 9, that `she is one of the French women who effaces in us the least doubt as to the renaissance of our country’. 26

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while our good elements (Communist factory workers)… applied themselves to methodic sabotage.30

One can tell, she continued, the `degree of civilization of a nation` from its working-class peuple, and the French peuple in the camp were intellectually, morally and socially of the highest stature.31 All French in the camp were `rabid patriots`.32 They recognized that many other inmates held them in low regard— as too weak or for coming from the land of the Vichy regime—and the national pride that infuses their postwar memoirs was fed by their years in the camp. Tillion wrote of her eighty per cent French Nacht und Nebel (NN) block that it was A block where insubordination to the Germans was always approved, where women who were hiding always found accomplices; the only block where swapping, the infamous black market of the camps, was effectively forbidden and replaced by fraternal giving [NN prisoners received no packages with goods from outside to exchange]; the only block where there was an organization to take care of the sick…. I had the occasion to assess a little more each day the depth of the honesty, the abnegation and the spiritual life of the majority of my comrades. It is normal that after the tumultuous convulsions of recent years, France feels disoriented and doubts itself, but the pillars are strong.33

Tillion’s initial writings on Ravensbrück were not characterized by a dialogic quality. She was interested in questions like how long it took new German guards to adapt to the brutal inhumane ways of the camp and what the guards’ sexual practices revealed about German culture. In view of medical experimentation carried out at Ravensbrück, material indicators of civilization were obviously inadequate markers of morality: `a civilization so evidently monstrous and at the same time identical in material appearances to that in which I had always lived, making like it professors, autos, newspapers, movie houses, conferences, doctors`.34 Tillion doubted the Western Allies could denazify the German population; only Communists, she wrote in dismay at the war’s end, could do the job.35 No dialogue was possible and the French learned about themselves solely through an unmediated self-description.

30

Tillion, `À la recherche’, 38 Ibid., 42. 32 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 211. 33 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 38-39. 34 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 129. 35 Tillion, `À la recherche’, 60-61. 31

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Tillion left Algeria in 1940 and, having set aside study of North Africa for that of the concentration camp in 1945, did not return until 1954, when she was sent by the government to investigate conditions following the outbreak of hostilities. A decade examining Ravensbrück had made her the analyst of the extreme situation, of the collapse of the relatively ahistorical structures that underlay much ethnographic work, including that she had done before the war. The rupture in her time in Algeria would also provide her the evidential foundation for her explanation of the transformation of Algeria which, she believed, had created conditions for the insurrection to develop. Tillion has often said that Algeria, not she, had changed between her departure in 1940 and her return in 1954. Yet Tillion’s experience had, of course, changed her. The pre-French-Algerian War Algeria she knew was also her pre-Ravensbrück world, a world literally destroyed when the notes and manuscripts she had prepared on Algeria disappeared at Ravensbrück. In L’Algérie en 1957, originally written in 1956 for the newsletter of the Association nationale des Anciennes deportées et internées de la Résistance (ADIR), Tillion began by recognizing that deported resisters’ reflexes were to support the oppressed and their own nation.36 If the decision to resist in 1940 was `simple`, she said `nothing is less “simple”’ than in Algeria.37 Tillion initially addressed the conundrum by putting aside the military conflict and interpreting the situation in such a way that by being true to itself, France could sap the war of its impetus. L’Algérie en 1957 retains traces of its genesis as a chronicle written `in memory of the coude à coude [elbow-to-elbow] of the camps and prisons`.38 She contended that the separation of French Algerians from the Algerian economy would leave North African Algerians `to pullulate` in destitution. It would be, in the language of the camps, `the poverty of the loaf-divided-in-five and then in six, until it came to the loaf-divided-in-ten of the concentration camps, and finally to the day when there was no bread at all`.39 Clocharde [tramp] was a word that occurred to many at Ravensbrück to

36

Germaine Tillion, L’Afrique bascule vers l’avenir (Paris: Éditions Tirésias, 1999), 65. The ADIR, which saw itself as non-political, but nationalist, was deeply divided over the response to the French-Algerian War. Olivier Lalieu, La Déportation fragmentée: les anciens déportés parlent de politique 1945-1980 (Paris: Boutique de l’Histoire, 1994), 47, 153-155. 37 Germaine Tillion, Algeria: the realities, trans. Ronald Matthews (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1958), vi. 38 Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1961), 13. 39 Tillion, Algeria, 74.

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describe their appearance.40 In L’Algérie en 1957, Tillion coined the term clochardisation to describe the social breakdown that characterized the movement of large numbers of unprepared rural people to urban areas, a phenomenon she had not seen in the Algeria she left in 1940.41 Tillion did not attribute clochardisation to colonial exploitation, explaining it instead as the untoward fruit of French public health policies that had broken natural forms of population control.42 The new clochards felt no responsibility toward their offspring as they had nothing to pass on to them.43 Clochardisation was a culturally French and non-Marxist alternative to lumpenprolétarisation, and in Tillion’s work was at antipodes to Frantz Fanon’s narrative of a lumpenproletariat that transforms itself in making revolution.44 Noting that L’Algérie en 1957 had originally been written for her association of deported resisters, Tillion explained that the deportation experience created a `secret kinship`, a kinship stronger than the bond of convictions that had brought individuals into the Resistance. And she saw deported resisters as more attuned to the inhumanity of clochardisation then resisters alone would be, for `the deepest difference between men is a difference of experiences`: All the same, the gamut of human experiences is limited, and almost any life generally contains a fair sample of them. Most men thus imagine that they have 40 Ravensbrück prisoner Suzanne Busson recalled that prisoners had resembled `more clochards than prisoners’. Jean-Pierre Vittori, ed., Le Grand livre des témoins (Paris: FNDIRP, 1994), 183. 41 Jean Cayrol, deported resister and author of the text of Night and Fog, wrote that at the end of the war, when `the celebrated [fameux] clochards, the deportees’ returned, `all Europe was clochardisée, France in particular’, but that by the time Tillion was writing of the clochardisation of Algeria, clochards were losing their place in French cities, becoming a ‘part of urban folklore’. Jean Cayrol, De l’espace humain (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 126, 128. 42 Tillion’s prewar field work was in the southern Aurès, an area with little French presence. Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad criticized Tillion’s concept of clochardisation for analyzing change in the Aurès without reference to colonialism, and particularly her extension of analysis of the Aurès to Algeria as a whole. Le Déracinement. La Crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964), 33. 43 Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (1999), 91. 44 Clochardisation resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s contemporaneous work on Algerian sub-proletarians, although Bourdieu embraced neither Tillion’s response of education and a trade nor Frantz Fanon’s of revolutionary consciousness. Pierre Bourdieu, `Les Sous-prolétaires algériens’, Les Temps modernes 199 (December 1962): 1038-1039; 1048-1049; Pierre Bourdieu, Algeria 1960, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 60-70.

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a fair idea of the meaning of physical pain, fear, loneliness, fatigue, humiliation and death, and that the wall that separates them from other people’s experiences has got cracks in it. They are, of course, wrong. Only a handful of very exceptional people succeed in translating the inklings their lives have given them into terms of another’s experience. Even they will be better able to do so if they have been really made to suffer, so that their imagination is stimulated to the necessary degree. Our five years of common struggle did no more than bring us together on the plane of ideas, decisions and characters, and all that amounts to very little. The prisons and the camps, on the other hand, furnished those who went through them with the vast spectrum of knowledge that cannot be learned from books—a quite special kind of education which was lavished on us, I feel, with extraordinary generosity. I have tried to draw on this education to explain a certain quality of distress which is gnawing at three-quarters of the world and which forms the muffled, 45 and too often unheard, accompaniment of the present martyrdom of Algeria.

As to the clocharde, wrote Tillion, `I affirm that the most ragged and the most famished was less so than certain of my poor comrades` at Ravensbrück.46 But to have the appearance of a clocharde was not to be clochardisé. In developing a response to clochardisation in Algeria, Tillion came to understand what had allowed her and her colleagues to resist clochardisation in the camps, and she applied this understanding of resistance to Algeria, rather than the military model of resistance that inspired both the army and many anti-colonialists. Reflection on her camp experience made Tillion aware of what differentiated her and her starving comrades from clochards. Those with no pride or nothing but the food to survive are clochards. Writing for her fellow deported resisters, she recognized that `We, at least, in our concentration camps, had earlier known dignity, useful work, reflection, responsibility—and this memory permitted most of us to remain members of the human race until the final agony’.47 Clochardisation was the move `without armor’ from peasant to urban life. Tillion’s goal became to give all Algerians the `armor’ her experience in the camps made her feel was necessary to allow the individual to escape clochardisation by being able to sustain future projects— education and a trade. 45

Germaine Tillion, ‘Preface to English Edition’ of Algeria. The Realities, trans. Ronald Matthews (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958), 6-8. Clochardisation quickly entered French political discourse. In 1960, for instance, General de Gaulle lamented that `the independence of Algeria would be the clochardisation of the Algerians’. Roger Trinquier, Le Temps perdu (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), 357. 46 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 52. 47 Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (1999), 91-92.

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If, in 1946, Tillion had joined her comrades in celebrating the French character revealed in the camps, Algeria a decade later forced her to reflect on the sociological foundations of French resistance to degradation in the camps. Tillion’s experience at Ravensbrück had been with an extraordinary group of women—the `republic of citizens’ to come. Clochardisation led patriarchal `republics of cousins’ like those in Algeria to cripple themselves by taking solace in a social culture intended in rural areas to keep women from marrying outsiders (which would alienate family lands). These norms became the basis of a degrading urban culture of veiling and confinement that crippled societies by depriving them of women’s presence in the public sphere: `The great victim of this situation… is woman, who ceases to be a “cousin”, but is not yet a “person”’. 48 Seclusion of women becomes the defense against clochardisation, but made escaping it all the more difficult: `societies which crush women….condemn themselves to clochardisation’.49 Tillion interpreted her work as an ethnologist as being like that of a lawyer, but one charged with defending a population rather than an individual.50 No society could avoid the types of changes Algeria had begun under French control, but to leave them half-completed was to doom Algeria to clochard status. The responsibility of the colonial power was to provide the colonized with the tools of resistance—of resistance to dehumanization. Clochardisation allowed Tillion to place the camp experience in a historical narrative. Slave trading had been the worst crime of the eighteenth century and colonialism of the nineteenth century. But the crime of our time will be the `clochardisation’ of three-quarters of the human race which is now taking place all across the globe. The concentration camp system? One can probably consider it as an extreme rationalization of the phenomenon, an attempt to make it a paying proposition. Anti-slavery was often an alibi for colonialism… and I ask myself if anticolonialism doesn’t serve as an alibi in some cases for `clochardisation’.51

48

Tillion, The Republic of Cousins, 165 Tillion, La Traversée, 125. 50 Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (1999), 18-19. Ethnographers, wrote Michel Leiris, often become the `natural lawyers [of the people studied] before the colonizing nation to which we belong’. `L’Ethnographe devant le colonialisme’, Les Temps modernes 58 (August 1950): 360. 51 Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (1961), 55-56. Maurice Merleau-Ponty too saw the rush to grant independence as forsaking duties of the kind incumbent upon a nation of which he wished to be a member. `At root, what bothers me among those of my fellows who speak too easily of independence, is that the duties they propose for themselves are always those of abstentions’. Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 417 [1958]. 49

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Before a power installs an industry or monocultural agriculture in the Third World, it should provide inhabitants with the means to defend themselves against this system or it would pay the price.52 Tillion believed that colonialism had failed because it did not recognize that `it is impossible to protect a population that is not able to protect itself’, and the successors to colonialism could suffer the same fate.53 Many French looked to memory of the Resistance for guidance in Algeria. For some, it anchored their decision to aid the Algerians in their struggle for independence; for others, it told them to defend a France under attack. But there were other possibilities to pursue. If, after the war, Tillion had celebrated deported resisters’ resistance to dehumanization (rather than the dominant military model of resistance) as an antidote to a demoralized France, she was prompted a decade later to examine what socio-cultural qualities had characterized the wartime Resistance and use this as a guide to developing what France could offer Algeria. At the request of Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, Tillion remained in Algeria after her return in 1954 to work in his administration. To provide Algerians the means to resist clochardisation, Tillion launched the Social Centers in 1955.54 The Social Centers were directed not against the colonial project per se, but against the pre-colonial, pre-Islamic culture that was the first recourse of an Algeria undergoing clochardisation.55 The Centers provided education, social services and job training. They drew upon the 52

Tillion, L’Afrique bascule (1999), 116. Ibid., 112. 54 Tillion, La Traversée du mal, 97. Nelly Forget, `Le Service des Centres Sociaux en Algérie’, Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 26 (January-March 1970): 37-47. James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 55-86. 55 Islam has long been the ultimate other for French culture in both its Christian and republican guises. Yet, Tillion argues, Islam is not an impediment to necessary change. Confinement of women is based on the persistence of pre-Islamic culture defending itself against injunctions of the Koran. `It all seems as if the Koranic lawgiver… deliberately used inheritance in both lines (male and female) to pulverize the tribal system, and thus to equalize, modernize, revolutionize, and democratize Arab society’. The Republic of Cousins, 30. In this case, the Koran and the Republican principles had similar projects— and both involved granting women individual rights. Since invading Algeria in 1830, the French had legitimated their colonization as a restoration of pre-Arab, pre-Islamic North Africa. But Tillion’s argument suggests that French efforts to break the Algerian social structure that impeded their hegemony were of a piece with the original Islamic project. Islam and the French republican state were the two modernizing, centralizing forces in Algeria. Pied noirs transformed the French Jacobin state to suit their interests, as Algerian `republics of cousins’ adapted Islam to fit theirs. 53

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experience of social activist groups in Algeria in the early 1950s composed of young French Algerians, primarily socially engaged Catholics, and North African Algerians: in Vincent Monteil’s words, `these admirable young men and women who devoted themselves wholeheartedly in an unanimous élan of Franco-Muslim fraternity, to construction of a more just and more fraternal Algeria’.56 If the camps had clarified what allowed some to resist clochardisation, they had also underscored the importance of another Third Republic virtue, solidarity, and the Social Centers became sites of a French Algerian-North African Algerian solidarity. Their very existence challenged the Algérie française project and provoked the hatred of many pieds noirs.57 The administrative personnel of the Centers was about half of European origin, half of North African Algerian origin, `a French elite respecting Algerians and an Algerian elite respecting the French’.58 The Centers were a haven for what in the southern United States would be called race traitors. `I know a number of pieds-noirs who were truly heroes`, Tillion explained, `in the sense that they systematically resisted the fundamentally unjust position in which they found themselves with respect to the Algerians. They took the side of the Algerians against the power they represented’.59 Social Center personnel—civil servants of the Ministry of National Education `loyal to the republican traditions of France`, wrote Tillion, `and refusing to participate in the “putting into place” [mise en condition] of the Algerian population’—were subject to arrest and torture, though few were found guilty of even minor offenses.60 Virulent unsubstantiated reports in the pied-noir press 56

Vincent Monteil, Soldat de fortune (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1967), 168-169 Reviewing L’Algérie en 1957, J.-M. Domenach quite rightly asked why humiliation and repression were absent in an account written by a deportee for deportees. Esprit 253 (September 1957), 301. 58 Tillion, À la recherche, 39 [1978]. These were the figures at independence. Forget, `Le Service des Centres Sociaux’, 44. 59 Roger Stéphane and Roland Darbois, Mémoires de votre temps (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1967), 231-232. 60 Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia, L’Assassinat de Château-Royal. Alger: 15 mars 1962 (Paris: Éditions Tirésias, 1992), 76. Social Center staff who worked with the FLN did so to achieve the goals of the Social Centers. Adjunct director Ali Hammoutene, FLN member since 1956, saw his work in this light: `Faithful to a lay and republican formation, the Muslim elites sympathetic to progress have no other dream. If they join the ranks of the FLN it is to permit the rapid realization of this dream and to participate in the building of a free and fraternal Algeria. France has the duty to aid in the building of this ideal’. Réflexions sur la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Publisud, 1982), 23. For Tillion, `it is to oppose France that they [the FLN] are utilizing French ideas (freedom, democracy, state-supported schools, equality, and resistance to oppression) and against France that they are imitating her civil and military institutions. It is nonetheless true that 57

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on the Social Centers as bomb factories and the site of FLN networks made them the target of attacks.61 Two days before the opening of meetings to set the terms of Algerian independence at Evian in March 1962, Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) ultras—`the bloody monkeys who make the law in Algiers’, in Tillion’s words62—assassinated six Social Center administrators meeting at El-Biar. Man of the left of Algerian origin, Jean Daniel, mourned the Social Centers as a prefigurement of an Algerian future shattered by the war: The Social Centers were truly miraculous islands of fraternity and of culture in the midst of a sea of atrocities and of hatred. They were the point of reference, the recourse, the example that we gave when we despaired of all. For years, French and Arabs who got to know one another inside the Social Centers had the impression of building a future more real, and at the same time, to create a sort of integrated franc-masonry, an aristocracy of understanding. `On en était.’ It was the visiting card of liberal activism.63

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The violence directed at the Social Centers takes us to the second phase of Tillion’s confrontation with her wartime experience via Algeria. Tillion’s account of deported resisters at Ravensbrück had celebrated virtue at the heart of French national character, but the nature of the French-Algerian War challenged this account. As in 1940, Tillion committed herself to the fundamentally patriotric project of defending France from those French who would sully it, whether by collaboration or the practice of torture. L’Algérie en 1957, with its focus on economic degradation, had drawn explanatory power from Tillion’s absence from Algeria between 1940 and 1954. However, her succeeding book, Les Ennemis complémentaires (1960), on the effects of the war’s violence on all involved, presented a different narrative, in which the French Algerian massacre of North African Algerians at Sétif in May 1945 is the crucial event. That Tillion was recuperating in Sweden from her internment at Ravensbrück when the massacre occurred and did not hear of it until 1954

what we are now destroying in their country is an image of ourselves, as though to add to the horror of the murder we are committing’. France and Algeria, 9. 61 Colonel Yves Godard, director of the Sûreté in Algiers—and one of the five members of the Conseil Supérieur of the OAS in 1962—produced an organizational chart of the FLN in 1962 in which the Social Centers occupied the place right next to the Comité de Coordination et d’Exécution of the FLN. Les Paras dans la ville (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 317. 62 Les Lettres françaises 919 (22-28 March 1962): 1 63 Jean Daniel, `Mouloud Feraoun’, Preuves 134 (April 1962): 2.

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gives her account a new chronology that resonates with her absence and the reason for it. The Social Centers had drawn upon what had allowed Tillion and her comrades to resist dehumanization in the camps. But the Fourth Republic’s abdication of its responsibilities to the army in 1956 and 1957 created a situation in which Tillion and other deportees asked whether the inconceivable was happening: were the French taking on characteristics of German forces during World War II?64 In 1954, on her first return to Algeria since 1940, Tillion was shocked to see French soldiers searching peasants with their hands up: `a scene I had seen many times in Paris between 1940 and 1942, but never between 1934 and 1940 in Algeria’.65 Among resisters, the extensive use of torture by the French army in Algeria raised specters of the Gestapo. `The accidents of history’, Tillion wrote, `would have it that among these witnesses of the sufferings of the alien people are certain Frenchmen who, less than twenty years before, had directly experienced these same crushing ordeals`.66 Many French characterized Algerian Muslims as prone to inhumane violence not found among the French. Tillion saw such condemnation as echoing those made by the French of Poles in the camps,67 and of Germans during and after the war. And, in turn, `at Ravensbrück, when the Germans spoke of French resisters, they used the same insults that I found (and recognized with so much shame) ten years later, in the mouths of partisans of a “war to the end” in Algeria`.68 The French army’s brutal policies of destroying Algerian elites and `regrouping` more than a quarter of Algeria’s population accelerated the clochardisation Tillion had initially explained in terms of the breakdown of a premodern demography.69

64 These comparisons could be quite complicated. Reading L’Algérie en 1957, Aimé Patri was led to reflect on the poor conditions of Algerian immigrant workers living in France and on measures taken by France during the ongoing war that restricted their ability to return to Algeria: `One would be tempted to compare their presence to those of work deportees [like the French conscripted to work in Germany during the war (STO)] and to say that if they still find themselves among us, it is because measures have been taken to prevent them from returning home, while their nation is in a struggle for liberation’. But Patri pulled back from this thought to echo Tillion’s contention that the most important fact is that the salaries Algerian workers earned in France were necessary to Algeria. `Problèmes de la “décolonisation”’, Preuves 78 (August 1957): 87. 65 Tillion, L’Afrique (1999), 21. 66 Tillion, France and Algeria, 125. 67 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 54-55. 68 Tillion, À la recherche, 226. 69 Germaine Tillion, `Préface’ to Michel Cornaton, Les Camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 9. See also Bourdieu and Sayad, Le Déracinement.

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After the end of the French-Algerian War, when Tillion returned to her work on deportation, she abandoned her postwar condemnation of the German people. During World War II, she wrote in the 1973 edition of Ravensbrück, `like many, I gave in to the temptation to formulate differences [between national cultures’ proneness to inhumane violence]: “they” did this, “we” wouldn’t do it… Today, I don’t think so at all, and I am convinced on the contrary that there does not exist a people sheltered from collective moral disaster’.70 Tillion concluded her 1973 Ravensbrück with a moving and emblematic account by Social Center worker Nelly Forget of her detention by the military, entitled `Former SS in Algeria’. Forget had been arrested in March 1957 by the first Régiment Étranger des parachutistes (1er R.E.P.) and held in secret and tortured at the villa Sésini. Forget explained that the one figure who treated inmates humanely was a German male nurse in the Foreign Legion who had been in the SS during the war. Taken prisoner on the Russian front, he was badly beaten and sent to Siberia. There a female Russian doctor cared for him and in Algeria he sought to repay this kindness.71

70

Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 213. Emblematic is Tillion’s move from presenting the sexual mores of German guards as revealing of a national culture in 1946 to seeing their wild sexuality in 1973 as a response to the anxiety caused by expression of so much cruelty. Tillion, ‘À la recherche’, 60; Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 89. By 1990, Tillion had decided that in writing about the camps, she should discuss not simply German responsibility, but also `the calvary of the German people and their efforts to escape the totalitarian hold’. Tillion, À la recherche, 188 [1990]. 71 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1973), 265-271. Germans were a troubling presence in accounts of the French military in Algeria. In his 1957 letter of resignation as secretary general of the prefecture in Algiers, deported resister Paul Teitgen reported on a German in the 1er R.E.P. carrying out interrogations at Sésini, who told prisoners that he was getting revenge for the French victory in 1945. Le Monde, 1 October 1960. However, Frantz Fanon’s comments on Germans in the French military as those whose very experience with inhumanity allowed them to tell the truth—a complement to the role sometimes given or assumed by Holocaust survivors—is more in line with Forget’s account. Fanon wrote in September 1957, `The French, for one whole year, have constantly repeated that only former SS soldiers serving in the Foreign Legion are responsible for the tortures. As a matter of fact, the majority of the deserters from the French army are foreign legionnaires. It is because they find French police methods revolting that these Germans and these Italians abandon the enemy ranks and join the units of the ALN (Armée de Libération Nationale). We have questioned them by the scores before their repatriation. These former legionnaires all say the same thing; the cruelty and the sadism of the French forces are frightful`. Frantz Fanon, `Algeria Face to Face with French Torturers’ in Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 68.

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In her analyses of concentration camp administration after the war, Tillion had focused on the immoral nature of German culture and the individual camp personnel. But reflection on the behavior of French Algerians and the French military during the French-Algerian War led her to shift her focus to the state. Tillion came to believe that only exceptional individuals could do good when the political structure that has nurtured and sustained them encourages inhumane actions. Her interpretation came to focus on the responsibility of governing institutions more than the guilt of individuals or peoples.72 Fourth Republic France during the French-Algerian War evoked references to Nazi Germany, not because the Republic resembled the Reich, but because in both situations the state, out of weakness or strength, allowed to persist or created situations in which ordinary people were encouraged to act immorally: those who dehumanize others necessarily dehumanize themselves. Tillion blamed the French state, not French Algerians, for French Algerian bullying of North African Algerians since only exceptional individuals would not take advantage of a situation of superiority that others (in this case, the French state) had created and sustained for them.73 But for this very reason, Tillion devoted significant attention to politically and socially-sanctioned moral elites who could resist the human inclinations created by totalitarian or inhumane governance, discussing in depth the leadership of resister elites in the camps and the calamitous destruction of indigenous elites by the French army in Algeria.74 Tillion’s first response to the war in Algeria was to draw upon what she had learned at Ravensbrück about the character traits and qualities that enabled some to resist dehumanization in the camps, and about the networks of solidarity that developed at the camp. This analysis was the key to her concept of clochardisation and to her development of the Social Centers. Tillion then turned to the republican state’s surrender of authority to the army and to the diehard leadership of the French Algerian community in 1956-1957, a surrender 72 This was the critique of L’Algérie en 1957 that Pierre Nora gave in Les Français d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 206-208. Nora’s friend François Furet (writing under the pseudonym André Delcroix) made a related critique of Les Ennemis complémentaires as introducing `politics solely at the level of desire and good will’. ‘À la recherche d’une paix sans vaincus’, France Observateur (2 February 1961), 17. 73 Stéphane and Darbois, Mémoires de votre temps, 231-232. Tillion, À la recherche, 266 [1958]; 288 [1961]. Thinking later of German camps, Tillion explained that the key was to prevent situations which `engendered crime’ by offering opportunities to human weakness. Ibid., 35 [1978] For Tillion, the French-Algerian War was `avoidable’, and all condemnations of torture and other abuses are secondary to this political failure. Ibid., 46 [1988] 74 On the decimation of elites in Algeria, see Tillion, France and Algeria, 11, 12, 136137; Tillion, L’Afrique (1961), 17-18; Yves Courrière, Le Temps des léopards (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 535.

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from which the Fourth Republic never recovered. Once again, Tillion thought in terms of her years in the Resistance75, not in the military mode of Frenchmen who assisted the FLN, but by drawing upon the patriotism which had led her to resist in June 1940. After all, Tillion never fought for the independence of Algeria per se, but for the preservation of a French republic true to what she saw as the values of the Republic. Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog had given a face to deportees in 1955. In succeeding years, Tillion and her close allies among deported resisters in the fight against the army’s use of torture and against the executions of FLN combatants, gave deported resisters a public voice that continues to be heard today. After the Algerian War, Tillion told interviewers that earlier, she would not have believed possible the torture carried out by the French in Algeria— `practices that were those of the Nazis’.76 `But now I have an idea, how should I say, less optimistic about my own country. In other words, if I want to praise France—and after all I do want to praise her—it is the fact that justice is, in any case, always represented’.77 She believed it was opposition like hers to torture that distinguished the French of the Fourth Republic from Germans of the Third Reich.78 When Jacques Vergès raised French actions in Algeria in his defense of Klaus Barbie in 1987, Tillion radically differentiated French war crimes in Algeria from Nazi crimes against humanity.79 However, the issue of collaboration during the war was whether the French acquiesced to or facilitated inhumane practices initiated by the Nazis. Tillion believed that mobilization of opposition in France to inhumane practices of the French in Algeria was crucial to revealing that France was not as some critics of the Vichy regime characterized her nation. In fact, Tillion’s presentation of certain actions as 75 Thinking of figures like Edmund Michelet, who, as garde des Sceaux from 1959 to 1961, challenged human rights abuses and executions of FLN combatants, Tillion recalled in 2000 that `Quite a few of those who denounced torture were ex-deportees’. À la recherche, 399. After Algeria achieved independence, Michelet founded the FranceAlgérie association and became the first president; he was succeeded as president by other deported resisters, Tillion and Hessel. 76 Tillion, La Traversée, 110. 77 Stéphane and Darbois, Mémoires de votre temps, 274. 78 Tillion, La Traversée, 110. 79 L’Express, 8-14 May 1987, 38. Tillion dropped the story of Nelly Forget from the 1988 edition of Ravensbrück, explaining that it had been misinterpreted as pairing the crimes of the Nazi era with those of the French-Algerian War: `one cannot, one should not confuse the atrocities committed in the panic of immediate danger with the planned exterminations of Nazism, a criminal civilization in its essence, in its ideal’. Tillion, À la recherche, 45-46 [1988], 189 [1990] (quoted). `I knew the two eras and I do not compare them’. Ali Ghanem, `Henri Alleg et Germaine Tillion parlent de la torture’, Le Quotidien d’Oran, 20 January 2001.

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resembling those of the Nazis was less about the particular nature of the army’s crimes than about mobilizing the French not to collaborate in these crimes. We began by referring to Tillion as the anti-Papon, not in terms of her activism, but in terms of her place in the French political imagination. Yet it is precisely this position that allows Tillion to doubt the value of trials like that of Papon held long after the time of the crimes for which he was accused.80 As she said in calling on the French government in 2000 to condemn the torture practiced in its name during the Algerian War, it is torture, not individual generals, which now needs to be condemned. The key is to mobilize to prevent torture today and in the future, not to try to rectify a past that cannot be rectified.81 Tillion pursues a utilitarian approach to past. She sees deported resisters offering the means to help construct communities in the future, but the Vichy Syndrome as an obsession with the past that is destructive of the community of France she values. And if there is a final reflection to be made on the experience of World War II and the French-Algerian War for Tillion, it is for France and Algeria to follow the example of France’s postwar relationship with Germany and to develop a relationship of peaceful cooperation in place of the war and injustice that preceded it.82 *

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Tillion’s engagement with the French-Algerian War brought her from the lessons of Ravensbrück to resistance against French betrayal of France and finally to an engagement with the reasons for the new `strange defeat’ of France in 1958. She explained that her years in the Algerian hinterlands distanced her from the bitter political battles in France in the 1930s that are now seen as having fed important elements of the Vichy regime’s project—in the same way that she presented her years in the Aurès, where there was virtually no European presence, as insulating her from a colonial outlook. And although she is careful to distinguish the `anemic’ France that experienced defeat in 1940 because it could not pursue war from the `splenetic’ France that experienced a coup that ended the Fourth Republic in 1958 because it could not end war, her reflections on the French polity which signed its death warrant in turning police powers 80

L’Humanité, 7 November 2000. Libération, 24 November 2000. 82 Tillion, La Traversée, 121-122. In 1962, Tillion thought many fleeing pieds noirs would return to Algeria in a few months, but saw Algeria facing a more difficult situation than France in 1945: the French had been able to `ignore’ Germany for a dozen years after the war, but Algeria would need to embrace France right away. `L’Armée, les Pieds Noirs et la France. Un entretien avec Germaine Tillion’, Jeune Afrique, 19-26 March 1962, 9. 81

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over to the army are of a piece with others’ reflections after 1940 on the demise of the Third Republic, including Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite, from which Tillion drew an epigraph in her account of the defeat of the (next) French republic.83 For Tillion, the postwar economic boom transformed the prewar French peasant society, in which she had seen similarities with the Algeria she studied in the 1930s, into a prosperous urban society.84 This brought French in the Hexagon a new degree of prosperity and consumer culture, but also a society characterized by a new anomie. The contrast is telling with Tillion’s characterization of the Resistance of 1940 as drawing on longstanding friendships and relationships: `these personal relations wove across France a true spider’s web’, without which there would have been no Resistance, she wrote in 1958, at the very time she was critiquing postwar France for weakening the basis of such webs.85 And equally telling are Tillion’s evocations of `the chain of braves gens and of gens braves who, without belonging to the Resistance, passed from hand to hand all the clandestins and hid and fed them’ and of the `tacit chains of solidarity’ at Ravensbrück.86 In sum, the Resistance she knew was the antithesis of the French society she saw developing around her.87 A decade later, in 1971, Tillion would interpret The Sorrow and the Pity as a document not of the France of 1939-1945, when a moral French collectivity

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Tillion, France and Algeria, 57. In L’Étrange défaite, Bloch uses his experience in World War I to analyze and critique the France of 1940, much as Tillion turns to her experience in World War II to interpret French actions in Algeria. Tillion was not the only reader of L’Étrange défaite in these years. Serving in Algeria during the FrenchAlgerian War, the historian Paul-Albert Février read L’Étrange défaite and reflected in September 1959 that ‘many passages in the book could be read as being about today [the French-Algerian War], as though the Resistance and the Liberation had been only a jolt with no effect on the system [un sursaut sans lendemain]’. Paul-Albert Février, Un historien dans l’Algérie en guerre. Un engagement chrétien, 1959-1962, ed. Jean-Marie Guillon (Paris: Cerf, 2006), 177 (quoted), 189-190, 472-474. 84 Ghanem, `Henri Alleg et Germaine Tillion parlent de la torture’. 85 Tillion, À la recherche, 105 [1958]. Fellow resister Denise Vernay cites Tillion’s bon mot that to join the Resistance, `one either had to have lots of connections or a lot of imagination in order to found a network oneself’. Guylaine Guidez, Femmes dans la guerre 1939-1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 219. 86 Tillion, À la recherche, 133-134 [1971]. 87 Most telling is Tillion’s wandering `Démocratie et colonialisme’, Preuves 112 (June 1960): 3-15, where, when confronted with the need to find coherence in the French population, she… evokes her three years of conversations with inmates in prisons and Ravensbrück during the war.

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was pitted against individual traitors88, but of the succeeding anomic, fragmented France in which the film was created and lauded. Competing interest groups given too much power in the constitution of the Fourth Republic89 took the place of citizens committed to the republic: the French were doing well economically, `but apparently they don’t know how to govern themselves’.90 Pressure groups—like pied noir stalwarts—prevented the state from articulating an independent position and then arbitrating.91 Tillion believed that initially the conflict in Algeria had been possible to resolve, but that looking solely in Algeria for solutions had been counterproductive. Impediments to a solution were to be found in failures of the French state. By 1960, Tillion saw French domination of Algeria coming only at the cost of its republican regime.92 In the decades after World War II, de Gaulle embodied for Tillion the leadership needed by a modernizing France; she repeatedly rejected François Mitterrand as exemplary of the failure of the Fourth Republic in Algeria, a politician who represented the France that could not learn from deportation or recognize that in Algeria, violence could only beget violence.93 88

Tillion, À la recherche, 132-134 [1971]. Tillion, La Traversée du mal, 101-2, 117. Ethnologists have access to a particular language of condemnation: voting the constitution of the Fourth Republic had been `an expatiatory ceremony corresponding to the rite of expulsion of sinners in societies more naïve than our own’. À la recherche, 99 [1958]. 90 Tillion, France and Algeria, 57. The argument echoes elements of Bloch’s critique of pre-World War II French society in L’Étrange défaite, and recalls Tillion’s earlier explanations both of what made some French more likely to resist than others and what had made Germany fertile grounds for Nazism. Reviewing what she learned at Ravensbrück, Tillion determined that resisters came from milieux bien encadrés, and rarely from `the isolated (white collar workers who were not politically active, peasants who didn’t go to mass, small businessmen, bankers, artists)’. Tillion, `À la recherche’, 41-42. Turning to Germany, she contended that a too rapid industrialization at end of nineteenth century had precipitated German peasantry into aboulisme citadin, lack of will among the citizenry. The post-World War I economic crisis had thrown elements of the German bourgeoisie into the proletariat where they lost their old codes of behavior—`the old military honor, bourgeois modesty, commercial honesty and the good little morals of the priest and minister’—without adopting the `fraternity, union discipline, and social justice’ of the people. `Between the two morals they have lived without morality, like dogs’. Driven only by egotism, bitterness and hateful patriotism, they were primed for Nazism. Ibid., 60-61. Tillion does not see the prosperous Fourth Republic open to fascism, but does see a similar collapse of the values of citizenry as opening the way for the Republic to cede responsibility to the army and the Ultras. 91 Tillion, La Traversée, 101, 103-4, 117. 92 Tillion, France and Algeria, 116. 93 As Minister of Anciens Combattants, Mitterrand expelled Tillion’s organization of deported resisters from the apartment it was using as an office in Paris to make room for 89

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Metropolitan France was the site of economic prosperity, but also of a decline in the forms of social community upon which the Republic depended. North African Algerians were experiencing economic and social collapse. Clochardisation bred hopelessness, while consumerist metropolitan France imbibed `a complacent picture of the bountiful future that contemporary science holds in store for us’.94 L’Algérie en 1957 had explained the need for the creation of a vast program of Social Centers to provide Algeria the means to make the unavoidable entry into what Tillion always refers to as the modern world, without falling prey to clochardisation. But Les Ennemis complémentaires, her second book on the French-Algerian War, suggests a more complex reading of this project. Looking to metropolitan France, Tillion sees the `extreme complication of our political life’ deriving from `phenomena of “modernism”’; `emotional poverty which is the seamy side of the modern world’; and which `break[s] off the traditional relations between individuals’.95 Tillion laid out her thoughts in an article entitled, `La France en miettes’, an evocation of Le Travail en miettes, a study of the effects of Taylorized work processes on worker sociability by her Resistance colleague Georges Friedmann.96 Friedmann showed that Émile Durkheim’s expectation that the specialization of labor would become the basis for new forms of `organic’ sociability had not been born out; industrial workers were deeply alienated by modern production processes. Borrowing a metaphor from Friedmann, Tillion argued that the complications of contemporary global politics required analysis by `technicians’, and that modern electors could not be expected to play this role. Citizens’ relation to the democratic political system was like that of workers to production in the modern factory: the result was `the weakening of the parties and the Parliament, and the strong hostility that exists in France against them’.97 `The divorce between the leaders of public opinion and that public itself seems wider in France than in any other nation of the world’—a situation Tillion contrasts with Algeria, where both North African

his ministry. In 1956 Mitterrand was the garde des Sceaux when the government approved the first executions in Algeria, a policy Tillion believed led to disaster. And as president in 1983, Mitterrand reinstated the full rights and advantages of army officers to the generals who had rebelled against the republic during the French-Algerian War. Tillion, L’Afrique (1999), 18. Tillion, La Traversée du mal, 92. Tillion, À la recherche, 254 [1983], 265 [1965]. 94 Tillion, Algeria, 39. 95 Tillion, France and Algeria, 58-59. 96 Georges Friedmann, Le Travail en miettes (Paris: Gallimard, 1956). 97 Tillion, France and Algeria, 78.

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Algerians and French Algerians `follow their leaders without too many zigzags’.98 If the French republic might have offered a new political world to replace that which Algerians had lost with the collapse of their traditional communities, the brutality of the war put an end to this possibility. A new Algerian nationalism triumphed in its place. In the intercessor’s natural rhetoric of complementarity, Tillion suggested that Algeria needed the economic success that France had attained, while France needed a new national identity that would mirror and transcend the one Algeria was achieving. In 1962, she explained to an interviewer that a bitter defeated France was more threatened by turning its back on world interests, on the building of the `homme terrestre’, than by fascism or communism.99 Tillion saw France as having the chance to escape consumerist anomie by embracing a new form of solidarity and to become the antithesis of Nazi Germany by providing Algeria with the resources to resist clochardisation. And France, precisely because it was not one of the two postwar superpowers, could offer assistance with fewer constraints on the recipient’s ability to resist.100 Germaine Tillion began her public dialogue with deportation immediately after the war by presenting the deported resisters in the camps as embodying the very moral qualities France would require to recover from the war. Deportation was not the end of resistance: it made resistance an even more all-encompassing commitment. A decade later, Tillion’s analysis of and conversation with the deportation experience during the French-Algerian war began with recognition of the qualities that had enabled French resisters to survive in the camps and a call to bring these qualities to Algerians to fend off clochardisation. She then moved to a realization that any people, including her own, if encouraged or left unchecked by their governing institutions, could become perpetrators of an inhumanity like that at the heart of the camps. Tillion pursued her dialogue by crossing from Algeria back to France, a society in which most inhabitants were experiencing the inverse of clochardisation. She believed that to counter the unprecedented anomie of the consumerist postwar world, the French state and people could and should make a commitment to overcoming the root causes of the degradation of Third World societies. The model of Resistance upon which Tillion drew was not the armed struggle against the Germans, which inspired combatants on both sides in Algeria, but the struggle to save lives and resist dehumanization like that she had known and chronicled in the camps. 98

Ibid., 69. Yvon Le Vaillant, `Regards actuels sur le fascisme’, Témoignage chrétien, 9 March 1962, 21. 100 Tillion, France and Algeria, 84. 99

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Tillion was not the only resister deported to Ravensbrück who entered into a fruitful public dialogue with her wartime experiences. After the war, Charles de Gaulle’s niece, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, saw the qualities revealed by deported resisters at camps like Ravensbrück as necessary in postwar France and condemned what the camps revealed of German society.101 She took an active role in the ADIR and served as its president. Like her close friend Tillion, she came to pursue a new intense relationship to her camp experience in the late 1950s, a relationship that incorporated all three elements of Tillion’s dialogue with deportation during the French-Algerian War: the experience of the deportees, the recognition that perpetrators could come from one’s own society, and the responding effort to make one’s own society the vanguard of the effort to counter institutions of dehumanization in the postcamp world. In June 1945 de Gaulle Anthonioz told an audience in Paris that patriotism had brought people like her to the Resistance and from there to the concentration camps. It was in the camps, `we received our greatest reward. We believed we were defending only France, but our mission was quite a bit larger and grander. In defending France, it was mankind we defended’.102 While Tillion always maintained the ethnologist’s distance from her subject of study, de Gaulle Anthonioz pursued a similar trajectory working from within a social Catholic framework which began with a personal identification with the apparently alien other. In 1958 de Gaulle Anthonioz accompanied Father Joseph Wresinski to Noisy-le-Grand, a shantytown outside Paris. There she saw in the faces of the poor the distress she was sure had marked her own face at Ravensbrück.103 On her return from Ravensbrück she had sought to `bury deep inside herself’ the camp experience, but what she learned of the poor `ploughed [her] deportation experience…, bringing it all to the surface’. 104 The stink of those with no place to wash made her re-experience `the humiliation of being disgusted with oneself’. When children from the shantytown died in a fire, she could not help

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Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], L’Allemagne jugée par Ravensbrück (Paris: Grandes Éditions Françaises, 1947). For de Gaulle Anthonioz’s Resistance activities during the war, see Margaret Collins Weitz, `Geneviève de Gaulle: Refusing the Unacceptable’, Contemporary French Civilization 18 (Winter-Spring 1994): 56-63. 102 Élisabeth de Miribel, La liberté souffre violence (Paris: Plon, 1981), 174-175. 103 Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret de l’Espérance (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 1516. 104 Ibid., 63.

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but think of infants murdered at Ravensbrück.105 She realized that `she had never completely left’ the camp106—and that this persistence of dehumanization, like that of the camps, was intolerable. At war’s end, many resisters had spoken of the desire not to be like the anciens combattants of World War I, locked in the endless retelling to one another of experiences no one else could understand. But de Gaulle Anthonioz posed the question: `Do we now accept to be “anciens combattants”’? To accept the existence of shantytowns where men and women live without the rights others enjoy throws into question the choice made to join the Resistance, which she saw not as a past experience, but as a life commitment.107 And as a survivor, she took memory of the camps as a responsibility: no one understands the need to fight for justice better than those who have been deprived of their rights. `The crime against humanity can begin imperceptibly’.108 She refused a society that, `without the will to degrade of the camps’, created the misery that excludes.109 Where Tillion had seen clochardisation as a product of the stifled transition from a collapsing rural society to a nascent urban society in Algeria, de Gaulle Anthonioz saw such a process taking place in metropolitan France, where she explained it as a result of the breakdown of rural society during the postwar economic boom.110 While Tillion focused on the anomie that threatened the majority in France which profited from les trentes glorieuses, de Gaulle Anthonioz looked at the excluded minority. She could not help but recognize similarities between a society premised on the dehumanization of others—the core of which had been camps like Ravensbrück—and postwar 105

Geneviève de Gaulle [Anthonioz], `La condition des enfants au camp de Ravensbrück’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 45 (January 1962): 7184. 106 de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 14-15. 107 Ibid., 37-38. 108 Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz in Michel de Saint Cheron, De la mémoire à la responsabilité (Paris: Dervy, 2000), 69. 109 Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 152-153; de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 103; de Gaulle Anthonioz in de Saint Cheron, De la mémoire, 84 [quoted]. In her memoir of Ravensbrück, de Gaulle-Anthonioz refused to separate herself from the breadstealers, on the grounds that bread-stealers had been created by the camp. The Dawn of Hope: A Memoir of Ravensbrück, trans. Richard Seaver (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 17. 110 However, Tillion did pursue projects in the spirit of the Social Centers in France. After De Gaulle came to power in 1958, Tillion entered the government in the cabinet of Minister of National Education André Boulloche, a deported resister whose mother had died at Ravensbrück and who had lost his brother and his father at other camps. There Tillion worked out a program to allow individuals to pursue their education while in prison—to develop the tools to escape clochardisation.

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France. True, in the latter there were no SS, but there were many whose lives of indignity were ignored or dismissed by the prosperous majority. Social programs in the Fourth Republic were aimed at the least marginal of the poor. In language that recalled triage in the camps, de Gaulle Anthonioz condemned the government’s practice of simply dispersing the underclass of `“irrecupérables”’, objects of a quasi-universal rejection. Wasn’t this what Nazi doctrine decreed: `“lives not worthy to be lived”’?111 Tillion had seen the emergence of Nazi-like practices in the French army in Algeria. De Gaulle Anthonioz took this uncomfortable evocation home to civil society in the Hexagon. De Gaulle Anthonioz committed herself to the project of Father Wresinski, which became Aide à Toute Détresse-Quart Monde (ATD-Quart Monde), a group for which she served as president. Wresinski broke with traditional models of charity, believing that self-respect and human dignity were the basis of improvement. `La misère begins the place where shame begins’, he wrote. De Gaulle Anthonioz framed the work of volunteers in movements like ATD-Quart Monde as that of resisters who refused the unacceptable against all odds in 1940112, as well as descendants of the community of deported resisters.113 She came to understand Wresinki’s project of enabling the poor to live in dignity and with hope by recalling the Resistance and deportees’ efforts at Ravensbrück.114 And, like Tillion, she found allies among those who knew— resisters and deportees.115 If the camps revealed the nadir of human morality, they had also revealed to deported resisters like de Gaulle Anthonioz an unsurpassable sorority and solidarity.116 She joined Wresinski in opposing the government plan to raze the Noisy slum and spread inhabitants around the country; belonging to a community was all the inhabitants of Noisy had.117 For de Gaulle Anthonioz was committed to the idea that the poor themselves be the agents of their own liberation and that the assistance model should be abandoned since in spite of the material relief it delivered, it fostered through dependence the indignity she saw as immoral and unrepublican. Those without the tools to effect their own fates would become, in Tillion’s term, clochardisés. The solidarity of poor women in shantytowns reminded de Gaulle Anthonioz of her wartime “fraternity of concentrationnaires,” whose unfathomable generosity, humanity and courage was elicited by deprivation and 111

de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 47. Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 11; de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 89. 113 de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 93. 114 Ibid., 25, 38, 96, 101. 115 Ibid., 31-32, 46, 55, 109. 116 Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 41. 117 Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 162. 112

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dehumanization.118 Democratic capitalist societies are able to recognize the wrongs created by ethnic discrimination like that in pre-independence Algeria, but have much more difficulty recognizing their responsibility in creating and sustaining the misery of the poor. De Gaulle Anthonioz’s response was tempered with a Catholic sensibility lacking in Tillion’s republicanism: `The poor help us in this for they have an unimaginable power of comprehension and of pardon’.119 ATD-Quart Monde offers a Catholic variant of the Social Center response to clochardisation. As an ATD-Quart Monde leader, de Gaulle Anthonioz sat on the Conseil économique et social and played a leading role in the passage in 1998 of the loi d’orientation, which made the struggle against exclusion a `national imperative’. The legislation extended the conception of solidarity inherited from the era of Durkheim to include legal guarantees of a minimum material well-being for the marginal and the excluded. As individuals, she argued, they deserved and required the respect and consideration they do not now receive.120 No one did more than deported resisters like de Gaulle Anthonioz to make inclusion and exclusion crucial concepts in French politics in the 1990s, although they found these terms inadequate, preferring to speak of `cohesion’. Had Gaullists broken with their party leadership and voted for the loi d’orientation, she believed, it would have been `a sort of echo of [her uncle’s] Appel [of 18 June 1940]… a refusal of mediocre politicians’.121 Drawing upon her own experience as quintessential insider—the niece of Charles de Gaulle— but equally one who had made the choice to resist and then experienced the depths of exclusion through deportation, she sought to reframe the liberal project, recognizing that the realization of the rights of man is more than a matter of their affirmation. ‘Our societies manufacture exclusion, while the privileged continue to enrich themselves. This results in what I call a vitiation of democracy’.122 Ardent anti-communists like Jean-François Revel were shocked when de Gaulle Anthonioz said, `I knew Nazism, I know Stalinist totalitarianism… I fear we are in the process of giving in to another totalitarianism, that of money’.123

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de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 21, 35, 76-77. Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 210. 119 Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 213. 120 L’Humanité, 7 June 1997. 121 de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 175. 122 Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 210. 123 Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz. 208. For Jean-François Revel’s response, see La Grande parade (Paris: Plon, 2000), 206-7. In conversation with Communist leader Robert Hue, de Gaulle Anthonioz saluted the `generosity and faith in man’ of the Communists.

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The poor were not simply poor; they were excluded and their poverty was a function of their exclusion. The exclusion of the poor was based on their inability to exercise rights to housing, employment, health care, education, justice, and family life, rights that the majority of French took for granted. The fundamental right in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed in 1948 in response to the shock of the camps—where de Gaulle Anthonioz had been `tested to the extreme by the negation of all rights’—124 was the right of all to `dignity’. When de Gaulle Anthonioz served as rapporteur for the loi d’orientation, she made respect of human dignity for all the bedrock of the Republic and placed the law in the tradition of the Conseil national de la Résistance assertion of republican values.125 De Gaulle Anthonioz put forth her experience as resister and deportee—when `they had fought for the dignity of all human beings, so that their rights and their value would be recognized’126—as the basis of a dialogue with postwar France. She challenged the nation to recommit itself to fulfillment of the `rights of man’ at home and the world. The effort to assure dignity to the poor, to combat exclusion, would allow France to reassert its universalist vocation.127 Having experienced the camps herself, she sought to break the paralyzing obsession of those haunted by memory of the camps, in part because they had never known deportation. Like Tillion, de Gaulle Anthonioz saw responsibility to struggle for human dignity today as the best response to collective memory of the camps.128 *

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Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz had played active and important roles in the Resistance, the congeries of movements in occupied France. But they drew from deportation to Ravensbrück an experience they translated into a broader understanding of resistance as resistance against the inhuman. Resistance movements had projects and programs for the postwar world. However, the resistance that Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz took from Ravensbrück offered something else. They drew on their experiences as Democracy, she said, needs the `itch’ (poil à gratter) they provide. Interview with Françoise Colpin in Regards, September 1997. 124 de Gaulle Anthonioz, Le Secret, 20. 125 Ibid., 192-93. 126 Glorion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 77 (quoted), 145. 127 de Gaulle Anthonioz in de Saint Cheron, De la mémoire, 89, 95. 128 Another deported resister and close friend of Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz who has followed such a course is Anise Postel-Vinay, who works with the immigrant rights group, France Terre d’Asile.

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deported resisters to put forth narratives of deportation with compelling sets of imperatives for survivors and their audiences: Tillion placed the experience of camp prisoners in a continuum of clochardisation preceded by slavery and colonialism, enterprises in which France played a larger role than Germany, while de Gaulle Anthonioz extended the camp experience past 1945 to the creation and maintenance of an underclass in advanced capitalist societies like France. Reflection on their years at Ravensbrück encouraged Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz to look upon those left outside of prosperous postwar France—clochards in Algeria and the desperately poor in France—as being of the world they had lived in the camps. This encouraged them to revisit their experience as providing understanding and insights for resistance of these disinherited. In 1968 de Gaulle Anthonioz oversaw the change in mission of the ADIR from an association to defend deported resisters to an association to defend the rights of man.129 Tillion and de Gaulle Anthonioz recognized that their own radical difference from les misérables in the postwar world suggested that the very economic, political and social power the French people as a collectivity now exercise opens the way to becoming complicit in the perpetration of inhumanity for all who do not chose to combat the mechanisms of exclusion. They affirmed that pursuit of this mission could give the haves what they have not: a sense of community and solidarity. Deported resisters had affirmed community and solidarity by fighting the consequences of their own deprivation and exclusion. Their more fortunate descendants can assert these values by fighting the deprivation and exclusion of others today.

129

Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, 154.

CHAPTER FOUR RE-VIEWING THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS WITH GERMAINE TILLION

Whatever the outcome of this Algerian war, it is certain that in fifty years, one hundred years, the Algerians will remember. They will teach their children what that year 1957 was. Legends will be born of the time when the Casbah, the most profound symbol of their community, was night and day under siege, when terror reigned as absolute master, when each of the inhabitants could at any time say: `In an hour, maybe they will knock on my door and take me away forever…’ —Pierre Leulliette, a paratrooper in Algiers1 At first, we did not want to believe that they would torture the men on the floor above. Torture in the home? Unthinkable! The French Resistance had been an apprenticeship and a model for the young of my generation. We have immense admiration for these men and women who fought for the honor of their country. In our minds, the French could not act like the Nazis! Realizing what was happening that night, I began to scream: “This, France? France, the mother of the arts and laws, the France of equality and of fraternity?” I was screaming, risking having my enemies hear me, yes, they were becoming my enemies. That night sealed my divorce from France. —Zohra Drif, held by paratroopers in the first floor of a house in Algiers on the night of 2-3 February 19572 I learned from the newspapers that in the Algiers Casbah a leader of the FLN [Yacef Saâdi] and his young woman companion [Zohra Drif] were holding out against the assaults of the French army. I read the instantaneous legend. In the Casbah, the oldest of Algeria’s cities, the most folded up, the convoluted one, the cascade of alleyways with the odors of urine and spices, the secret of Algiers, and, if I had been able to name it then by its hidden name, I would have called it An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in History Workshop Journal 60 (Autumn 2005): 93-115. (© Oxford University Press, 2005). Permission to reprint has been granted by Oxford University Press. 1 Pierre Leulliette, Saint Michel et le dragon. Souvenirs d’un parachutiste (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1961), 317. 2 Florence Beaugé, Algérie. Une Guerre sans gloire (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2005), 204.

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Germaine Tillion is the absent presence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. Reintroducing Tillion opens up this film by revealing decisions made and debates engaged in its construction and reception. These textual breaches carry new political charges today, as we think about the nature and meaning of terror and resistance. Tillion was an ethnographer researching in the Aurès in Algeria during the final years of the Third Republic. Shortly after she came back to France, she experienced the `strange defeat’ and organized one of the first resistance groups. Arrested in 1942, Tillion was deported the following year to Ravensbrück. Upon her return to France in 1945, she put aside study of North Africa for that of the camps, the `history of the de-civilization of Europe’.4 Tillion served as a consultant to Alain Resnais’ documentary on the camps, Night and Fog (1955). Jean Cayrol’s filmscript for Night and Fog ends with the warning that we may think concentration camps were of one time and place and fail to look around us and hear the cries of victims today.5 Several years earlier, the board of Tillion’s association of deported female resisters had voted to join the Commission Internationale Contre le Régime Concentrationnaire (CICRC), an international organization of non-Communist political deportees to Nazi camps launched by David Rousset. As camp veterans, CICRC members `knew’, wrote Rousset, `that where the concentration camp bell rang, it rang for them’.6 Tillion never separated her resistance experience from her years at Ravensbrück; she understood that to remain loyal to oneself, one’s principles, and one’s comrades in the camps required a heightened resistance and it is this understanding that she would bring to the war in Algeria. Shortly after the Algerian War of Independence began in November 1954 the government sent Tillion to Algeria to assess the situation and she 3

Hélène Cixous, ‘Letter to Zohra Drif’, College Literature 30:1 (Winter 2003): 82. Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris : Seuil, 1988), 14. 5 Jean Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard (Paris : Fayard, 1997), 43. Resnais later said that he saw Cayrol pointing to French practices in the war in Algeria. Richard Raskin, Nuit et brouillard (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987), 51, 57. 6 David Rousset, `Le Sens de Notre Combat’, in Paul Barton, L’Institution concentrationnaire en Russie (1950-1957) (Paris: Plon, 1959), 10. Germaine Tillion, À la recherche du vrai et du juste, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 197-203 [1950-1951]. The original publication date for materials from this collection is given in brackets. 4

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stayed on to establish an innovative education and job-training program, the Social Centers. In 1956, the situation in Algeria deteriorated as the Fourth Republic began to surrender its authority to the army and to Algerians of European origin, pieds noirs. In March 1956, the National Assembly voted to give the army `special powers’ to put down the insurrection, including the right to detain individuals without pressing charges. The French state refused to recognize FLN combatants as political prisoners or prisoners of war. In June 1956 two FLN militants were guillotined in the Barberousse prison in Algiers, where the overcrowding made executions a public performance with immediate repercussions in the city. This was an act of `enormous symbolic weight’ for both French Algerians and North African Algerians in Algiers since the refusal to grant clemency was interpreted as marking a new degree of Parisian acquiescence to the pieds noirs.7 If the French army’s use of torture could always be blamed on `an irresponsible subordinate’, the execution of FLN militants, done in the name of the French Republic, was, Tillion wrote, `what a certain stratum of “colonial” public opinion insisted upon, the definitive compromising of the only possible arbitre of the conflict, in order to render that conflict insoluble’.8 The FLN answered the executions with attacks on civilians in the streets of Algiers. The police killed two gunmen, one of whom lived at 3, rue de Thèbes in the Casbah. On 10 August 1956, a group of pieds noirs, aided by the police, set off a bomb there that killed more than fifty people: `the first “terrorist” bomb exploded in Algiers’, wrote Tillion, `but it was a French bomb’.9 French authorities made no effort to track down the perpetrators. On 30 September 1956, the FLN responded by detonating bombs at two of Algiers’ most popular cafés, the Milk Bar and the Caféteria. In January 1957, faced with a general strike called by the FLN at the opening of the session of the United Nations to show that it represented Algerians, Governor-General Robert Lacoste ‘stabbed the republican regime in France in the back’, wrote Tillion, by turning over police powers in Algiers to paratroopers (paras), commanded by General Jacques Massu, a wartime hero

7

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État (Paris : La Découverte, 1989), 77. Germaine Tillion, France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Knopf, 1961), 144-145. 9 Tillion, À la recherche, 264 [1971]. According to Yacef, the rue de Thèbes bombing was one of about twenty bombings carried out by pied noir extremists between April and September 1956. Yacef Saâdi, The Battle of Algiers: Urban Guerilla Warfare, privately published, 11-13. To prevent the inhabitants of the Casbah from attacking the European neighborhoods after the rue de Thèbes bombing, Yacef promised the inhabitants that the FLN would avenge these deaths. Marie-Monique Robin, Escadrons de la mort, l’école française (Paris : La Découverte, 2004), 86. 8

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who had joined de Gaulle in London in 1940.10 For Pierre Vidal-Naquet, delegation of police powers to the army led the French republic to betray itself by condoning the daily and systematic use of torture: `The French army was quite poorly equipped for the task. Unlike the German army of 1933-1945, it did not have at its disposal a special police, bureaucratic and terrorist at the same time, which accompanied it in its moves’. Massu set up a force that `had to play at the same time the role of the SS and that of the Gestapo’.11 Colonel Roger Trinquier, assigned to intelligence in Massu’s regiment in Algiers (and member of Massu’s Committee of Public Safety of 13 May 1958), had spent the war as a Vichy officer in Shanghai, but invoked the Resistance memory by contending that French resisters had known that their violation of the rules of war in occupied France meant that they accepted that they could be subject to torture if caught: `Their glory is to have calmly faced those risks with full knowledge of the consequences’—and he thought FLN combatants who employed terror should do the same.12 Edward Behr estimates that during the Battle of Algiers, thirty to forty per cent of adult males in the Casbah were arrested for questioning; all arrested, male and female, were tortured, wrote Tillion, unless saved by the rapid intervention of a powerful protector.13 It is difficult not to read Tillion’s scholarly work on the French Resistance published during the French-Algerian War as a response to this situation. In 1958, she wrote that, `Thanks to German repression (that began its role as recruiter for the Resistance in the second half of 1941), the latent sympathy [of the French] grew more and more active from year to year…. When the enemy’s use of torture spreads, the danger of contacts [among resisters] grows inordinately—but the solidarity and will to strike of the oppressed people grows inordinately as well. And it is the enemy that loses the most’.14 Secretary-general of the prefecture in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, a resister who had been deported to Dachau, recognized in Algerian prisoners signs of the torture he had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo. He tallied more than 3,000 suspects in police custody who had `disappeared’ in the first months of 1957, many so as to do away with the 10

`L’Armée, les Pieds Noirs et la France. Un entretien avec Germaine Tillion’, Jeune Afrique, 19-26 March 1962, 9. 11 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, `Le Cahier vert expliqué’, in Jacques Vergès, Michel Zavian, and Maurice Corrégé, eds., Les Disparus. Le Cahier vert (Lausanne: La Cité, 1959), 97-98. Tillion wrote to Camus that the FLN committed one assassination for every hundred committed by the French. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus (Paris : Gallimard, 1996), 686. 12 Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare, trans. Daniel Lee (New York: Praeger, 1964), 22n. 13 Edward Behr, The Algerian Problem (New York: Norton, 1961), 117; Germaine Tillion to Cardinal Feltin, 7 December 1957, in Germaine Tillion, Les Ennemis complémentaires (Paris: Éditions Tirésias, 2005), 286. 14 Tillion, À la recherche, 99,106 [1958].

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evidence of torture—what he bitterly called `my list of Maccabees’.15 Army approval of torture undercut the basis for a republican military, creating an environment of what Tillion termed `authoritarian anarchy’, that would encourage the military’s participation in revolts against the Republic and in the terrorist Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) as the war ended. `After 1957’, Tillion asserted, `the FLN was too closely associated with the Algerian masses for any lasting détente to occur without its total agreement’; the FLN could be temporarily silenced, but it would always reconstitute itself and re-emerge.16 The army captured the FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi in late February 1957. Told the war was lost, he responded by citing the ‘Chant des partisans’ of the French Resistance: `Another will take my place’.17 Ben M’Hidi refused to collaborate; the army murdered him and claimed his death was by suicide. His military adjunct, Yacef Saâdi, assumed leadership in the Casbah, and led the FLN there in a `David against Goliath’ battle against the army.18 At the end of February 1957, after Ben M’hidi’s capture, the five-person executive council of the FLN, the Comité de coordination et d’exécution (CCE), left Algeria, a step the beleaguered Yacef experienced as a `real betrayal’.19 What the French military termed the Battle of Algiers ended with the capture of Yacef and Zohra Drif on 24 September 1957, and the deaths two weeks later of fellow combatant and reknowned militant Ali la Pointe, who refused to surrender, along with Hassiba Ben Bouali, and Yacef’s nephew, Petit Omar. The Battle was a turning point in the French-Algerian War, a military victory the brutality of which made it impossible for France to win the war—to achieve its ostensible goal of fostering an Algeria where French Algerians and Muslim Algerians could live together in peace.20 The war created the Algerian national identity whose existence Tillion had questioned in the first

15

Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN 1954-1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 327. Tillion, France and Algeria, 23, 28, 164. 17 Frédéric Allaire in `États d’Armes’, in The Battle of Algiers, Criterion DVD, 2004. 18 Yacef Saâdi, Mémoires de la Bataille d’Algier (Paris : Julliard, 1962), 34. 19 Robin, Escadrons, 105. 20 Tillion reported that in 1956 North African Algerian boys wanted to own a sports car when they grew up and girls wanted to be teachers. Their dreams were those of their French Algerian peers. Algeria: the realities, trans. Ronald Matthews (New York: Knopf, 1958), 65. The Battle of Algiers changed this. In October 1957, Tillion showed Camus essays written in June 1957 by thirty North African Algerian eleven and twelve-year olds in response to their North African Algerian teacher’s question, `What would you do if you were invisible?’ All now responded that they would take up arms and kill French paras and government officials. Tillion, Les Ennemis complémentaires, 174-187. `I despair of the future’, Camus wrote in his notebook. Carnets III (Paris : Gallimard, 1989), 213-214. 16

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years of the conflict. `We forged and tempered it with our own hands’; `beating the yolk with oil, we made the mayonnaise—now Algerian unity is made’.21 *

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I have substituted the camera for the machine gun. The idea of re-living those days and recalling the emotions I felt, moved me greatly, but there is no rancor in my memories. Together with our Italian friends, we desired to make an objective, fair-minded film, one that is not a trial of a people or of a nation, but is only a heartfelt act of accusation against colonization, violence, and war.—Yacef 22 Saâdi

With the end of the war in 1962, the French released Yacef and he published a memoir he had written in prison on the Battle of Algiers. He spurned the offer to become a minister in the new Algerian government, preferring to go into business and founding Casbah Films, the first film production and distribution company in Algeria. In 1963 Yacef assembled private and Algerian government funding and sent a representative—one of his bombmakers during the Battle of Algiers23— to Italy, in search of a director to make a film on the Algerian War of Independence. Yacef settled upon Gillo Pontecorvo, then known for La Grande Strada Azzurra (1957), the story of a fisherman pursued by the coast guard for his use of homemade bombs to catch fish; and Kapo (1960), a tale of betrayal and redemption in a concentration camp—a film whose sets echo Night and Fog, but which condemns the inhuman consequences of an inhumane system by depicting individuals, rather than the anonymous figures and collectivities of the documentary. Pontecorvo came from a bourgeois Jewish family. Before World War II, he had dropped out of university and gone to Toulon where he served as a liaison between underground anti-fascist groups in Italy and Italian exiles in France. A competitor in international tennis matches, Pontecorvo could travel abroad without arousing the Italian government’s suspicion. He joined the Communist Party in 1941 and served as commander of a resistance unit in Milan and the Alps. Saying what he learned in the resistance found a place in The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo offered Yacef and his comrades the respect Tillion gave

21 Tillion, France and Algeria, 175. Tillion to Louis Mangin and André Boulloche, 31 July 1957, in Tillion, Les Ennemis complémentaires, 220; Germaine Tillion, `Que pensent-ils? Que ressentent-ils?’, Faim et soif 41 (July-August 1961): 23. 22 Gillo Pontecorvo, `“The Battle of Algiers”: An Adventure in Filming’, American Cinematographer 48:4 (April 1967): 269. 23 Gary Crowdus, `Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: An Interview with Saâdi Yacef’, Cineaste 29:3 (Summer 2004): 32.

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them as well: `Resistance is the same in Algiers as it is in Paris, Turin or Milan’.24 After the war, Pontecorvo was inspired to become a filmmaker by Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), a film whose depiction of the liberation of Italy is echoed in The Battle of Algiers.25 Pontecorvo quit the Communist party in 1956, but remained politically engaged on the left. He planned to do a film on the Algerian war, Parà, that focused on a French journalist (and former paratrooper) to be played by Paul Newman or Warren Beatty—Pontecorvo contacted both. The reporter was to be `like the society he represented, … hollow, empty, with only one overriding concern—efficiency’.26 Meeting with the OAS would bring the reporter face to face with colonialism. But Yacef convinced Pontecorvo to scrap the idea of a film on a European intellectual in favor of one on the Battle of Algiers, seen from the perspective of the Algerians. The Battle of Algiers had been prompted in 1957 by the FLN’s effort to internationalize their struggle by holding a general strike when the United Nations met; the project of the film was to internationalize memory of these events. Casbah Films co-produced The Battle of Algiers, the first feature film shot in independent Algeria. Yacef, a former soccer star who spoke fluent French, played his own character in the film, El-Hadi Jaffar.27 One goal of Casbah Films was to invite foreign directors to work in Algeria and to use the experience to provide training for Algerians in all aspects of film production. Pontecorvo brought only nine Italian technicians with him. His crew hired a number of Algerians and introduced them to the various elements of the trade.28 For screenwriter Franco Solinas, The Battle of Algiers was the quintessential New Left film: the revolution, thwarted by working-class integration in Europe, was possible in the Third World and would lead to the demise of capitalism in the First World.29 Working from Pontecorvo’s experience in another war of resistance, against the Fascists and the occupying Germans, as well as from Yacef’s original script (`awful, and with a sickeningly propagandistic intention’, according to Pontecorvo30), from Frantz Fanon’s essays, and from interviews with a number of French and Algerians, Pontecorvo 24

‘The Dictatorship of Truth’, in the The Battle of Algiers DVD. The Battle of Algiers ends, like Paisà, with the pairing of the hunting down of a group of resisters and the liberation of the nation. 26 PierNico Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. A Film Written by Franco Solinas (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 164 (interview with Pontecorvo). 27 Yves Godard, Les Paras dans la ville (Paris: Fayard, 1972), 100. 28 Pontecorvo, `“The Battle of Algiers”’, 267; Guy Hennebelle, `Une si jeune paix’, Cinéma 65 101 (December 1965): 27. 29 Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, 192 (interview with Franco Solinas). 30 Irene Binardi, `The Making of The Battle of Algiers’, Cineaste 25:2 (Spring 2000): 15. 25

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and Solinas produced a less heroic drama than Yacef had originally proposed. Yet France, still torn apart by the war, banned the film when it was released in 1966. Authorized in 1971, The Battle of Algiers confronted threats of violence in French theatres; it was not broadcast on a major television network in France until 2004. In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo condemned the French state, not the French soldiers. He did not make the French paras into the SS of Kapo. `About the repressive forces, we tried to present the paratroopers as normal— not maniacs, sadists, or exceptional cases, let’s call them products of rational, supercivilized France—because we meant our condemnation to reach beyond them to the political machine itself. In effect it becomes a historical condemnation of those men behind the paras—of colonialism itself.… I wanted the paras to look like Martians—an irresistible, rhythmical, invading force whose arrival changes the balance of power’.31 While much of the torture carried out by the French army in Algeria was done to humiliate and terrorize the population, torture in the movie appears less gratuitous, part of a policing strategy to purge the Casbah of the FLN. Pontecorvo and Solinas starkly present the inhuman nature of terrorism and repression carried out by the FLN and the army, not to condemn violence as such or to claim that there could have been a good way (without terrorism or torture, for instance) to fight this war, but to condemn a quasi-colonial situation that generated such violence, and the immoral, unethical, yet rational system of repression that operated through startlingly accessible figures like Mathieu—a composite of Massu and other paratrooper officers, Marcel Bigeard in particular. The Battle of Algiers ends with the demonstrations of December 1960, marked by masses of veiled and unveiled Muslim Algerian women ululating and dancing in the streets of Algiers, demonstrations that took both the French and the FLN by surprise, and which were, for this very reason, emblematic of an Algerian independence that could not be repressed. These demonstrations won for Algerians the support from the United Nations for independence they had been seeking in the JanuaryFebruary 1957 strike.32 31

Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, 166, 175 (interview with Pontecorvo). Jules Roy thought the paras were `dressed up like Martians’, but this made them appear inhuman to him. Gilles Perrault, Les Parachutistes (Paris: Seuil, 1961), 185. Massu saw the panache of the paras (‘impeccable and silent’) as crucial to their success; he ordered that they wear a beret in place of helmets and keep their `leopard’ uniforms spotless and trim. La Vraie bataille d’Alger (Paris: Plon, 1971), 95-96. On the cult of the paras in a France still traumatized by the emasculation of the defeat in 1940, see JeanPaul Dollé, L’Insoumis (Paris: Grasset, 1997), 31-32. 32 Djamila Amrane, Les Femmes algériennes dans la guerre (Paris: Plon, 1991), 203207.

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As long as torture exists and functions, Franco-Muslim “collaboration” resembles too much Vichy collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation, which developed profitably for some at the same time that it filled the prisons and concentration camps and pretended to ignore the tortures of the Gestapo…. A nation that resuscitates the ignoble behavior of the Gestapo and the Nazi SS, like the camps of Stalin. This nation is France! —Louis Martin Chauffier, deported French resister who, with Tillion, 33 accompanied the CICRC delegation They executed three men yesterday morning, one of whom was completely innocent… and two guilty of “attempts” to assassinate. Guilty like André Boulloche (who was armed when the Nazis arrested him): like me accused of having tried to `neutralize’ (that is to say, having wanted to `eliminate’) the French traitors. My great regret moreover was to have failed. The days of executions, they hear the noise of keys at 3 a.m. It is the signal for hysteria throughout the prison. It is next to the Casbah and they stand watch each night, waiting for the signal. Hysteria follows in the Casbah…. We are (after 12 years of peace) in the process of making nice [faire `Mimi et Épuration’] with the Germans, and we are some of those who would do it more willingly if the Germans had been less out of control [un peu moins ‘bavé’]. Can we wait twelve years to speak with the Algerians? 34 —Germaine Tillion to Louis Mangin, 27 July 1957 If ethnology, which is a matter of patience, listening, courtesy and time, can still serve a purpose, it is to learn to live together. 35 —Germaine Tillion

Although there were a number of Algerians of European origin and French across the Mediterranean who aided the FLN, they do not appear in The Battle of Algiers. The film is premised on the unbridgeable divide between the French and North African Algerians, what Yacef referred to as a `system of apartheid’.36 For the authorities, wrote Tillion, `All Muslims were suspects, all French who frequented Algerians were equally suspect; all suspected were

33

Louis Martin-Chauffier, L’Examen des consciences (Paris: Julliard, 1961), 58-59, 112113. 34 Tillion, Les Ennemis complémentaires, 204. Tillion instructed Mangin to pass this letter on to André Boulloche, her friend and director of the civil cabinet of the council of ministers in 1957. Boulloche had joined the Resistance in 1940, and, like his father and brother, was deported to Buchenwald; his mother died at Ravensbrück. 35 Tillion, À la recherche, 59 [2000]. 36 Crowdus, `Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers’, 32.

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arrested and often tortured’.37 The Social Centers were, Tillion explained in 1957 to Louis Mangin (childhood friend, resister, and member of the president’s military cabinet), `the only public service that had contact with the Muslim masses’; sixteen Social Center employees were arrested during the Battle of Algiers.38 In response to reports from Algeria, the CICRC launched an investigation of human rights abuses there. Tillion accompanied a committee of three non-French deported resisters on their visit to Algeria in June-July 1957. The committee found evidence of torture and denounced it in their report. ‘All I had seen for a month, all I had lived twelve years earlier, was like a sack of lead that crushed me’.39 Tillion despaired: `All the Algerian elite was in prison. All those who, among the Europeans and the Muslims, could have made up the first core of a true Franco-Algerian community were imprisoned, tortured’.40 She wrote to Mangin and André Boulloche at the end of July 1957 that the `big idea’ of Massu’s staff appeared to be `to return to 1830 [the year France begin its invasion of Algeria], eliminating all who think in the present and the future… the only ones with whom we can find a modus vivendi….’41 This was the context of an event that Pontecorvo does not present in his film, an event which briefly and tentatively bridged the chasm developing between the French and Muslim Algerians. As Tillion prepared to leave Algiers, a scared North African Algerian female friend met her and said that `they’, she could not say who, wanted to meet her.42 Tillion thought she would be given a detailed dossier on torture that the CICRC could use.43 She agreed to meet the FLN and at 2 p.m.—siesta 37

Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia, L’Assassinat de Château-Royal (Paris: Tirésias, 1992), 69. Tillion to Mangin, 22 July 1957, in Les Ennemis complémentaires, 198. 39 Tillion, À la recherche, 260 [1964]. 40 Yves Courrière, Le Temps des léopards (Paris: Fayard, 1969), 535. 41 Tillion to Mangin and Boulloche, 31 July 1957, in Les Ennemis complémentaires, 218. 42 Otherwise unattributed material on these meetings is drawn from Tillion’s accounts in Les Ennemis complémentaires, 58-87, 188-272 (some of which is translated in Tillion, France and Algeria, 22-51). Tillion wrote this document in 1957-58 as a woman who devoted herself to saving lives and ending the war. When she told Charles de Gaulle in December 1958 that Yacef had ceased attacks on civilians ‘solely for moral and humane reasons’ (Les Ennemis complémentaires, 336), she was making the case for his pardon, but she was also analyzing an individual whose acts and motivations could not be accounted for by the unidimensional account of Massu’s staff. Tillion endows Yacef with complex attributres like those she asks Yacef to see in individual French men and women. Yacef termed Tillion’s account of their meetings `honest and faithful’. The Battle of Algiers, 19. See also Yacef’s account of the meetings in his interrogation after his arrest. Massu, La Vraie bataille, 297-300. 43 `Casbah 1957’, Révolution africaine, 2-8 August 1990, 43-44 (interview with Tillion by Azzeddine Chaâbane). 38

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time—on 4 July 1957, a day so hot Tillion noticed that the bus tires left tracks in the tar, she followed a twenty-year old guide from her hotel through three bus changes to a dwelling in the Casbah, the same one where Yacef and Drif would be captured in September. There she was received by a woman she later learned was Fatiha Bouhired, whose husband Mustapha Bouhired had been tortured and then killed while allegedly trying to escape. Her niece Djamila Bouhired had been arrested in April and charged with placing bombs.44 Tillion was escorted to a darkened room. There she met a young woman and two men, armed to the teeth, `Far West style’; they were wearing khaki clothes and carrying automatic rifles and revolvers, with grenades in their belts.45 The woman introduced one of the men as `Big Brother’. Tillion would later find out this was Yacef. He introduced the other as `our glorious Ali la Pointe’. When the woman was arrested, Tillion would learn that she was Zohra Drif. Drif had set the bomb at the Milk Bar and played an important role working with Yacef to manage operations in the Casbah. Tillion recognized that there was something deeply incongruous about this meeting in an Algiers gripped by fears of terror and army searches: ‘I found myself in the heart of the city, in a pleasant and peaceful parlor where two charming young women were serving tea to “terrorists” in full battle dress, tommy-guns in their hands…To add to the surrealist ambiance there was a beautiful coffee cake [moka] on the table. I was at first pretty amazed….For a good while, we regarded each other menacingly, asking ourselves why we were there’.46 Tillion broke the ice by speaking of her recent work on Algeria. Her account of the social crisis in Algeria and what France should do to respond to it, L’Algérie en 1957, had generated a great deal of interest in France. But Tillion hoped to engage Algerians as well. She believed that neither the French army nor Algerian nationalists could definitively defeat their opponent and that the hope for Algeria lay in an `economic symbiosis with France’. Yacef pursued the conversation, saying `We aren’t accustomed enough to thinking of such things’. 44 Courrière, Le Temps des léopards, 534-538. How was Yacef able to use the Bouhired residence as a hideout for so long ? When his sister told the army that Fatiha Bouhired knew where her brother was, Fatiha Bouhired, with the approval of Yacef, responded by blaming the FLN for her husband’s death and volunteering to be an informer. Providing innocuous information, she was believed and the army ‘protected` her house. Once, French soldiers stayed there three days, while Yacef and Ali la Pointe hid in the attic. The soldiers praised the couscous Fatiha Bouhired served them (in which Ali la Pointe took care to spit). Ibid., 545-546. Amrane-Minne, Des Femmes dans la guerre d’Algérie. Entretiens (Paris : Karthala, 1994), 134-136 (interview with Fatiha Bouhired); Yacef, Mémoires, 111-113. 45 Amrane, Les Femmes, 112. 46 `Casbah 1957’, 43.

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When Tillion explained what she saw as the dire fate of an independent Algeria without a special relationship to France, `Yacef exclaimed, “Then I’ll never be a free man!”’ His tone, Tillion noted, `was neither hostile nor angry, but genuinely hopeless’. When her hosts turned to the French army’s use of torture, Tillion responded that she knew of this through her work with the CICRC. She then brought up Melouza, site of an FLN massacre of a community with ties to a rival nationalist organization. The FLN had denied responsibility and blamed the French. Yacef believed this account and had responded with the bombing of the Casino de la Corniche, along the beach in Algiers, in June 1957.47 Tillion had been to Melouza and interviewed survivors about the murders and mutilations. When Ali la Pointe denied FLN responsibility, she dismissed him out of hand. But whereas the French army had widely publicized the massacre in order to demonize the FLN, Tillion used it to suggest a lesson beyond the tortures and mutilations of the respective armies: `I could not help pointing out to [Yacef ] how unfair it was to attribute to a whole group the crimes committed by some of its members, and that what was unfair to him was unfair to us as well’. As an ethnologist, Tillion conducted research by exchanging stories with her informants and this is what she did in the room in the Casbah. Speaking of poor nations, Tillion mentioned famine, `saying that [she, as a camp survivor] was the only person in that room who knew exactly how one went about dying of hunger’: Then [she] told a number of personal anecdotes and mentioned the statistics [she] had accumulated before 1942 on the causes of arrests, describing the informers who had decimated [their] ranks. “That’s the hardest thing to forgive”, I said. Yacef interrupted me excitedly. “Oh, if it would only stop, I’d forgive everyone”….[Tillion’s] experience of clandestine activities, of [her] ordeals during the Resistance, fascinated them by the comparisons they made with their own situation. They were also quite aware of the extreme compassion these analogies provoked in [her].48

47

Yacef Saâdi, La Bataille d’Alger, 2 vols. (Paris: Publisud, 2002), II: 339-340. In a coded letter Tillion sent to Yacef shortly before his arrest, she told him of her recent meeting with Charles de Gaulle: `I told [General de Gaulle]: [Yacef and the FLN] are like you, fifteen years ago. The resemblance is hallucinating…, the same high virtues (and also the same eccentricities, but I can’t be angry with them about this since I was the same as them). When I see them, I think of my poor brothers who are dead and this makes me want to cry (because they suffer as we suffered and even more)’. Massu, La Vraie bataille, 240. I have followed Massu’s decoding of the letter. 48

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Consequently, after about two and a half hours of conversation, Yacef smiled faintly and said something like: “You see that we are neither criminals nor murderers”. Very sadly, but very firmly, [Tillion] answered: “You are murderers”. He was so startled that he said nothing for a moment and seemed to be choking. Then his eyes filled with tears and he said: “Yes, Madame Tillion, we are murderers”.

Yacef told of crying three days and nights after the bombing of the Casino, a site chosen because no North African Algerians were allowed entrance (except employees like the dishwasher who set the bomb), and therefore there would be no North African Algerian casualties. The bomb killed nine and wounded eighty-five, and triggered homicidal pied noir mobs. Yacef said that he had gone to the Casino after the attack disguised as a woman. He saw the dead, among whom was a pied-noir friend with whom he played soccer and his friend’s fiancée whose legs had been torn off.49 Yacef lamented that bombs were the only way his group had of `expressing themselves’. Tillion responded that the vicious cycle of torture and executions by the French and terror by the FLN fed on one another: `Innocent blood cries out for vengeance’. Yacef expressed the wish that the bombs could be done away with. Tillion was struck by `the general spontaneity of all the protagonists… the total improvisation’. Writing for the court that tried Yacef after his arrest, she expressed her `profound conviction that he had no intention, in initiating this conversation, of speaking to me of his moral crisis…. His collaborators expected him to take responsibility in all domains. Therefore he had to support on his own the crisis of conscience [caused by the killing of civilians]…. The turn our conversation took—quite unexpected to both of us—precipitated, in my opinion, a decision he had already been contemplating a long time’. Left on his own by the departure of the CCE, Yacef extemporized. He assured Tillion that the FLN would lay off the civilian population, though he admitted that if there were more executions, he could not vouch for his promise, given what Tillion recognized as the pressure on a clandestine organization to react in order to maintain its credibility with the population. When she reiterated that she was not a representative of the government, Yacef replied, `That doesn’t matter. It is to you that I want to make this commitment and it is to you I make it’. Yacef and Tillion were, she later recalled, `each from [their] own side, saturated with shame, sadness and compassion’.50 As Tillion left, she turned to Ali la Pointe: `seizing him by his shirt collar, I shook him a little and said: “Did you understand what I said? Innocent blood cries out for vengeance!”’. Intimidated,

49 50

Courrière, Le Temps des léopards, 537. Tillion, À la recherche, 40 [1978].

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he answered: “Yes, m’dame’”. Led out of the Casbah by the guide, Tillion went for walk downtown, stopping at the Milk-Bar. Tillion returned to Paris and sought to mobilize comrades in and out of the government with whom she shared the experience of resistance and deportation, arguing that the executions should stop as long as there were no more attacks on civilians.51 Yacef had asked Tillion to meet with the CCE to discuss her ideas on Algeria’s future, and the French government encouraged her to engage in this `private conversation’. She was told, however, that she would have to go at her own risk, for the `government knew it had ceased to be obeyed [by the army] in Algeria’.52 And just before she left, the government told her that three more nationalists were to be guillotined. Wracked by the memory of her unsuccessful year-long effort during the Occupation to get French collaborators to intervene to stop the execution of the leaders of her resistance group, of the five years when she ‘revered “the terrorist” [the German term for resisters] and hated the executioner’, a shattered Tillion returned to Algiers, where the FLN lodged her in the Casbah. When the executions were carried out in Algiers, the FLN responded with eight bombings. But Yacef assured that there were no civilian casualities, so Tillion, disguising herself in the garb of a North African Algerian woman, kept her rendez-vous with him on 9 August 1957. The CCE was still in exile and therefore unable to meet Tillion. She saw Yacef and Drif again. Yacef, left on his own by the departure of his movement’s leadership, continued the dialogue begun at the first meeting. He spoke with warmth of future relations between Algeria and France. After the meeting, Tillion heard of two more executions of FLN militants, which she came to suspect was a deliberate attempt to provoke the FLN in order to drown it in a bloodbath. She wrote Yacef. ‘Instinctively, I wrote in the familiar (je le tutois)—for the first time—the same as at la Santé [the prison where she was first interned by the Germans], from one window to another as we were saying Adieu’. Tillion implored Yacef to refrain on his own and unilaterally from attacks on civilians—even though the French government had not stopped the 51

The memory of deportation resonates in French accounts of the French-Algerian War. In March 1957, at the height of the Battle of Algiers, Guy Mollet defended his government against charges of the widespread use of torture with the argument that a government that included former resisters and deportees could never sanction the use of torture. Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 117. Pierre Vidal-Naquet believed that Massu saw deported resister critics like Teitgen as having been crippled by the experience: `Traumatized by deportation, they sought to hinder [his action]. There are “good” deportees and there are “bad’ ones”’. Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État, 200. Massu, La Vraie bataille, 30. 52 Tillion, À la recherche, 260 [1964].

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executions. Yacef responded that he would and Tillion credits him with the absence of attacks on civilians between 4 July 1957 and his arrest on 24 September 1957. Tillion secured from Yacef acceptance of the `civil truce’, an agreement to end violence against civilians, that Albert Camus had sought from both sides and failed to attain early in 1956.53 Yacef’s group, she wrote, `had really interrupted the cycle of Algerian acts of revenge (and it was a hardened cycle) to permit the two communities to talk things out and perhaps come to an understanding’. Tillion saw the French government’s refusal to pursue the opportunities offered by her meetings as a missed chance to `abridge’ a war whose outcome was already decided.54 General Jacques de la Bollardière had fought with the Resistance maquis before serving as a para in Indochina and being posted as a commander in Algeria. Having lost men to the Germans’ use of torture during the war, he repudiated it as immoral. De la Bollardière was punished for his public condemnation of torture employed during the Battle of Algiers. He was the only French officer who would be punished for the practice of torture in the French-Algerian War—and he was punished not for authorizing or performing it, but for denouncing it. A decade after the end of the war, de la Bollardière described torture as having created `a frightful void, leaving a gaping abyss between the Europeans and the Muslims. It definitively compromised any chance for the pieds-noirs to continue to live in the land they so loved’. He thought that Massu should have refused the mission given him and made the government face up to its responsibilities in Algeria: Massu ought to have negotiated an immediate end to the `paroxysm of horror’ being fed by both sides. This was `possible and realistic’, de la Bollardière continued: Tillion had done what Massu should have done.55 The army attributed the cessation of attacks to its success dismantling the FLN in the Battle of Algiers. Yacef’s decision to initiate meetings with Tillion was certainly a response to the army’s devastation of FLN cells and to the FLN’s diminished capacity to operate in Algiers.56 However, while the FLN in Algiers was crippled, Tillion contended that later arrests, captured stocks of 53

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, `La justice et la patrie’, Esprit 388 (February 2000), 145. Tillion, À la recherche, 41 [1978]. On the meetings Tillion arranged in Paris between an emissary from the FLN in Algiers and leaders of the Republic, see Yacef, La Bataille d’Alger, II: 465-469. 55 Jacques de la Bollardière, Bataille d’Alger. Bataille de l’homme (Paris : Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), 146-150. 56 For the army’s position that Yacef was a `finished man’ when he met Tillion, unable to carry out further bombing campaigns, see Maurice Schmitt, Alger-Été 1957 (Paris: Harmattan, 2002), 68-70; and Marcel Bigeard, J’ai mal à la France (Ostwold: Éditions du Polygone, 2001), 155-156. 54

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bombs, and seized FLN documents revealed that the FLN was still intact and could have launched attacks. In any case, consideration of the exchange between Yacef and Tillion takes us beyond an assessment of the effectiveness of the army’s policing measures in Algiers. Yves Godard, who questioned the captured Yacef, thought the Yacef whom Tillion met was putting on a show57, yet the question remains whether historical actors are immune to the effects of their scripts. That Yacef and Tillion could improvise in response to one another suggests another future for Algeria than the one played out in the Casbah during the Battle of Algiers. After his arrest, Yacef did not betray his comrades, but he did seek to continue the project begun in the dialogue with Tillion. He told interrogators that `We must make our position flexible in order not to exhaust the people…. Independence, these are words, but we must act only in terms of reality’. He wrote to Belkacem Krim, FLN leader in exile, that French emissaries would be coming and that it was very important that these discussions be taken seriously. ‘Certainly’, he wrote, ‘the struggle will last years, I don’t deny it, but it is high time to find an equitable solution to this problem. The soil is saturated with blood and I think that you acknowledge the importance of putting an end to this conflict’.58 The idea that terrorism took a toll on its practitioners was inimical to the army, who thought FLN terrorists as pathological as Fanon thought French soldiers. Tillion, however, saw an opening to human dialogue in an inhumane conflict: Your friends are tortured, those near to you are tortured. You want to avenge them. You avenge them, naturally with the only arms possible: bombs. You fight passionately against the monster (colonialism, a monster without a face), but in a real city, a quite small city, a city of the Midi [southern France] where everyone knows everyone… Practically, it is not from colonialism that the bombs rip the head or an arm; it is your old playmate who was dancing with his

57

Godard, Les Paras, 361. Roger Trinquier, Le Temps perdu (Paris: Albin Michel, 1978), 263-266. Trinquier says he spoke at length with Yacef and found he supported Yacef’s demands for respect and equality. Yacef in turn told him that if the promises of equality made to North African Algerians at the time of the coup of 13 May 1958 had been made earlier, he would not have taken up arms. Laurent Theis and Philippe Rate, La Guerre d’Algérie ou le temps des méprises (Tours: Mame, 1974), 123-124. The imprisoned Yacef played an important role in some French officers’ imagined resolutions to the war. Jean Pouget says that officers wanted Yacef (or the imprisoned bomb-setter Djamila Bouhired) as the codirector of the Committee of Public Safety of 13 May, but that General Salan blocked the plan. Bataillon R.A.S. Algérie (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1981), 345-346.

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fiancée. (She lives, her legs cut off; he is dead.) Or that little girl walking with the doll. Or again the old lady who looks like your grandmother.…59

Unlike Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tillion saw terror, torture and executions not as evidence of an irrevocably divided colonial society, but as producing such a society.60 Tillion prepared a record of her meetings with Yacef for his trials in 1958; his lawyers slipped it to the press. Condemned to death three times, Yacef had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by Charles de Gaulle, thanks, Yacef now tells interviewers, to Tillion’s intervention.61 In 1963, Simone de Beauvoir published a condemnation of Tillion’s account as a saloperie, a piece of trash, a judgement she and friends had arrived at over dinner in 1958.62 Her slur underscored a divide among French intellectuals over the memory of the Resistance for engaged intellectuals. Tillion did not join in the Resistance-inspired activities (like Francis Jeanson’s Jeune Résistance) supported by Beauvoir and others of encouraging soldiers’ insubordination and aiding the FLN. A deported resister, Tillion worked during the Algerian War from a Dreyfusard tradition. She helped make the war for the French about torture done in their name rather than exclusively terror done by Algerians. Tillion attacked military injustice and torture as contrary to republican values. She believed that her struggle and that of many other French men and women against torture revealed that it was not the truth of the Republic, in the way the camps had been the truth of Nazi Germany. Tillion’s activism in Algeria was an element in the refashioning of the legacy of the Resistance in France from a military project to an enduring political and human rights commitment marked by memory of the deportation. This is the shift one sees come to fruition a decade after the French-Algerian War in the move from Régis Debray, whose 59

Tillion, À la recherche, 260 [1964]. Sartre developed a long critique of Tillion’s analysis of Algeria as based on an agencyless modernization rather than exploitation. Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 716-734. In turn, Tillion castigated Sartre in 2002 as having been `on the side of the assassins: “ Oh, Sartre would never have followed the assassins [in Algeria]. No… He was too proud. He would have to have been at their head… ! With the others following him”’. Georges-Marc Benamou, Un Mensonge français (Paris : Robert Laffont, 2003), 100. 61 Le Monde, 12 May 1994. 62 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses (Paris : Gallimard, 1963), 462. Tillion never forgot Beauvoir’s insult. In 2000, she characterized her life of engagement for an interviewer: `I’ve acted the best that I could, always with honesty, never any “saloperies”’. Marie-Louise Bernasconi, `Germaine Tillion, j’ai agi du mieux que j’ai pu’, Réforme 2872 (27 April 2000). See also Tillion, Les Ennemis complémentaires, 189. 60

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mother was a resister, and who was arrested in Bolivia after accompanying Che Guevara in 1967, to Bernard Kouchner helping to forge a new international French identity a few years later, in founding Médecins sans frontières. In a piece written in response to Beauvoir, Tillion said of such meetings as hers with Yacef that ‘all Algerians and all French who were mixed up in the Franco-Algerian tragedy (I want to say really [mixed up]) had similar experiences’.63 Yet it was the existence of such encounters in an environment saturated with fear and violence that made her meetings with Yacef so important and radical. They partook of the spirit of the resistance of 1940, not because they could be easily paired with the Manichean situation of 1940—they couldn’t—but because they manifested a refusal to accept the unacceptable and tried to combat it when others could only see any new course of action as futile. For this very reason, Tillion’s meetings with Yacef initially found little place in many accounts of the French-Algerian War. Yacef never mentioned them in his 1962 memoir. They ran counter to the narratives of independence, entitlement and expulsion which both Algerian nationalists and pied noir loyalists told of the conflict—that the true Algerian identity and future was independent from France or that Algeria was better off under the legitimate dominance of the Euro-Algerian minority. Nor after the inhumane violence of the Battle of Algiers would anyone in the FLN consider calling on Tillion as Yacef had. Reviewing records of the torture and disappearances of FLN militants which Jacques Vergès compiled and published in 1959, Vidal-Naquet noted that Vergès `systematically eliminated all testimony of Algerians making reference to cordial or simply humane relations between themselves and pied-noirs’. Deported resister Teitgen had resigned from the prefecture in protest over the army’s use of torture: Vergès told Vidal-Naquet that he hated Teitgen even more than General Massu. And Vergès detested Tillion, whom he blamed for preventing him from serving as lawyer for the FLN hero Yacef.64 This was the world in which Yacef wrote his account at the end of the war. Pontecorvo and Solinas did not think of moving from their original idea of an intellectual who contacted the OAS to an intellectual contacted by the FLN. Yet Tillion’s engagement with Yacef embodies important elements of Pontecorvo’s own ethical and moral perspective—that other absent presence embodied by no individual character in the film. Let us think about these missing scenes of Tillion, Yacef, Drif and Ali la Pointe as new—or forgotten—entrées to relationships of French to Algerians, 63

Tillion, À la recherche, 258 [1964]. Vidal-Naquet, Face à la raison d’État, 78. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mémoires (Paris : La Découverte, 1998), 123. For Vergès’ later, more nuanced, interpretation of Teitgen, see Jacques Vergès and Étienne Bloch, La Face cachée du procès Barbie (Paris : S. Tastet, 1983), 44-45. 64

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and of French and Algerians to their pasts. If the radical history of 1966 when The Battle of Algiers was released left no place for the dangerous encounters of Tillion and Yacef—dangerous because ambiguous, dialogic and emotional— perhaps this is why they are a place to look for radical alternative narratives now. In 1967, Tillion wrote, `we will not speak of the Algerian war for twenty or thirty years. See, we are just starting to take an interest in the Nazi concentration camps…. It’s a law of history: silence takes hold for a generation’.65 Beginning with soldiers’ memoirs written during the FrenchAlgerian war, France has negotiated its relationship to the conflict not through trials, as it has done for World War II, but through the exchange of stories. (After the French-Algerian War, France granted its army amnesty for acts committed during the conflict.) In 1971, Massu wrote La Vraie bataille d’Alger, a personal attack on Yacef—an effort to take back the victory Yacef had wrested from him in Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. For Jules Roy, Massu’s defense of torture in his memoir made it resemble the account the German general responsible for the massacre of the French village of Oradour in 1944 could have produced, but which no German—perhaps they had more decency Roy suggested—had ever written.66 Publication of Massu’s book led in November 1971 to a public exchange of letters between Massu and Tillion in which she attributed to the army the use of violence to heighten antagonisms in the population of Algiers, the strategy the army had seen the FLN using. Tillion reiterated her belief that during the Battle of Algiers, terrorist attacks ‘continually responded to the executions, and it would have been sufficient to stop the executions (there were several hundred) to stop the blind urban attacks—but those who needed to drive the European population of Algiers crazy, to use them as a battering ram against the Republic, were on the lookout to prevent pardons’.67 She told Massu that `states now know, thanks to you, that

65 Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris : Harmattan, 1998), i. 66 Jules Roy, J’Accuse le Général Massu (Paris : Seuil, 1972), 23. 67 Tillion, À la recherche, 264 [1971]. Alistair Horne suggests that Yacef’s impetus to meet Tillion was to save Djamila Bouhired. A Savage War of Peace Algeria 1954-1962 (New York : Penguin, 1987), 214. Tillion knew that Djamila Bouhired’s execution could trigger a new cycle of violence. Massu presents a letter he attributed to Tillion in which she proposes to Yacef in September 1957 that from the safety of Tunis, an FLN militant take responsibility for the acts for which Djamila Bouhired (and Djamila Bouazza as well) had been condemned to death. Massu, La Vraie bataille, 190-191.

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to be sure to lose a province, all they need do is win a “real Battle of Algiers” there’.68 But La Vraie bataille d’Alger was not Massu’s last word on the subject. FLN combatant Louisette Ighilahriz had been arrested in late September 1957, between the time of the capture of Yacef and the death of Ali la Pointe. In June 2000, Le Monde published her account of three months of brutal torture by Massu’s paras (and of her search for the French army doctor who saved her by transferring her to a hospital).69 During the war, Ighilahriz was shuttled through seven prisons before Tillion obtained house arrest for her in Corsica, from which she escaped back to Algeria.70 In response to Ighilahriz’s condemnation of him, Massu examined his conscience. In February 1957 the fervent Catholic Massu had written to the Pope to complain that the Archbishop of Algiers was not giving his forces the support they deserved. The next month, Massu had taken satisfaction in distributing the paras’ chaplain’s approval of torture to combat the FLN.71 After release of The Battle of Algiers, Massu had defended the use of torture, but in 2000 he changed his tune, declaring that torture is not indispensable in time of war and it would have been better not to have practiced it in Algeria. He favored acknowledgement and condemnation by France of its use of torture in Algeria.72 Ighilahriz also accused Massu’s colleague during the Battle of Algiers, General Marcel Bigeard, of complicity in her torture. Bigeard dismissed Massu’s regrets about the use of torture and called Ighilahriz’s story a `web of lies’, but announced in March 2002 that he wanted to go to Algiers to put a wreath on the monument of the martyrs of the war of liberation to render homage to Larbi Ben M’Hidi, head of the FLN in Algiers whom he had arrested in 1957. He evoked a fraternity of combatants which transcended national identity: `When one fights against a worthy enemy, there is often born a camaraderie much stronger than with the jerks who surround you’. In 2001 Bigeard had began corresponding with one of M’Hidi’s sisters, and it was she

68 Tillion, À la recherche, 263 [1971]. In the 1960s and 1970s, French officers taught the techniques developed in Algeria to military regimes in Latin America. Robin, Escadrons. General Paul Aussaresses, the commanding officer who specialized in the use of torture in Algeria, recommended the screening of The Battle of Algiers in these seminars because of the authenticity of the scenes of torture. Libération, 4 November 2004. 69 Le Monde, 20 June 2000. 70 Le Monde, 23 June 2000. And Tillion obtained permission to take Ighilahriz on a camping trip in Corsica. Louisette Ighilahriz, Algérienne (Paris : Fayard, 2001), 168-169. 71 Massu, La Vraie bataille, 159-162. 72 Le Monde, 22 June 2000.

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who had invited Bigeard to Algiers, saying he had not ordered her brother’s murder and citing his admiration of M’Hidi.73 Tillion was one of twelve prominent intellectuals who had fought torture during the French-Algerian War who asked the French government in 2000 to follow the precedent of admitting and seeking repentance for the Vichy government’s collaboration in the deportation of Jews; they believed that the government should `by a public declaration’ condemn the use of torture during the French-Algerian War.74 But Tillion did not see this as a prelude to trials of individuals. It is `essentially a duty of truth. If it was a crime in the past, torture is also a crime of today and—I’m afraid—a crime of tomorrow. It is especially because of tomorrow that it is necessary to condemn it today, and not because of the past, by vengeance’.75 She spoke in the deportee’s voice of Cayrol’s closing to Night and Fog. *

*

*

Pontecorvo’s original title for The Battle of Algiers, `Thou Shalt Deliver in Pain’, evoked in gendered terms the Algerian people in struggle. He now says that at the time he was filming The Battle of Algiers, he could see women’s role in public life in Algeria declining. This is why, he explains, that he `wanted to end the film symbolically with one woman’, the woman dancing with the Algerian flag.76 During the war, Tillion had written that strict Muslim fathers whose daughters joined the resistance wavered `between consternation and patriotic pride. Who can conceive of … the heroine in trousers agreeing to resume [wearing]… the black haïk [body veil]… and consenting to express her personality henceforth only in her baking?’77 But, Tillion wrote a few years later, `In our age of generalized decolonization, the vast world of women indeed 73

Marcel Bigeard, Crier ma vérité (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 2002), 104-115 [on meeting with M’Hidi’s sister in December 2001], 146-155 [denial of Ighilahriz’s story]; Le Monde, 29 March 2002; 29 October 2002. M’Hidi’s sister condemned Massu for failing to take responsibility for her brother’s death. Le Monde, 31 October 2002. 74 Libération, 24 November 2000; Le Monde, 23 November 2000. 75 Tillion, À la recherche, 396-398 [2000]. 76 Gillo Pontecorvo in `Marxist Poetry: The Making of The Battle of Algiers’, in The Battle of Algiers DVD. When tanks made their appearance in the streets of Algiers in June 1965, everyone thought filming of The Battle of Algiers had begun. But it was the military coup that overthrew President Ben Bella, the leader since independence whose radical politics included an affirmation of the new position won by women in the revolutionary struggle. Le Monde, 12 May 2004. His successor, Colonel Houari Boumedienne, articulated a more conservative politics of gender. Filming of a past that could also suggest a different future for women began in July 1965. 77 Tillion, France and Algeria, 8.

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remains a colony in many respects’.78 Women’s participation in resistance movements was not sufficient to secure their emancipation: the birth-control pill, Tillion argued, not women’s participation in the Resistance, had changed their situation in France.79 For Tillion, women’s confinement in independent Algeria was a product of challenges to the endogamous `republic of cousins’ established in the pre-Islamic era to keep land within the family. This `republic of cousins’ had progressively extended the enclosure of women within the confines of the family in response to each threat to its power, beginning with that presented by injunctions mandating female inheritance in the Koran. As an ethnographer, Tillion did not think, like Fanon, in terms of immediate, radical change.80 She saw systems of behavior strengthened and reified in times of strain: transformations born of the war added to pressures to confine women. Tillion recognized that despite the professed goals of FLN revolutionaries, independent Algeria remained a `republic of cousins’, in which threats to the extended family brought by proletarianization of an expanding population, by French population regroupment policies during the war, and by postwar development projects, accentuated the seclusion of women. The patriarchal Family Code of 1984 that denied women equality in family law was the Algerian state’s response to an Islamic fundamentalism that fed off disappointments and insecurity in independent Algeria. In 1981, when Tillion recalled the meetings with Yacef, she read Zohra Drif through her work on the `republic of cousins’. Tillion spoke of seeing Algerian women who had undergone a `thousand-year training (dressage) from which they were unable to free themselves. If an older woman could assume some power and responsibility through her husband and sons, Tillion saw the young women before her as powerless. `Zohra Drif was still a child’.81 Drif’s memory, on the other hand, is of being cut off by Tillion: ‘Germaine Tillion really set me on edge. We were living ensnared with the responsibility of responding to the executions when we didn’t have the means. And she, who represented the resistance, was coming to give us a moral lesson: bombs, they’re bad. Overcome, I broke in: “Shut up, big baby”, she said to me. So things wouldn’t get bitter, I shut up, letting Yacef continue to lead the discussion…’82 The meeting between FLN militants and Tillion saw gendered behaviors in French and Algerian society questioned and confirmed: in response 78 Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Al Saqi Books, 1983), 166. 79 Ania Francos, Il était des femmes dans la Résistance (Paris : Stock, 1978), 459. 80 See Frantz Fanon, `Algeria Unveiled’ in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 35-67. 81 Amrane, Les Femmes, 111-112. 82 Amrane-Minne, Des femmes, 141. Yacef, La Bataille d’Alger, II : 395.

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to Tillion, who was playing the role French men refused, Yacef told how he had cried after the bombing of the Casino; Drif the obedient soldier adopted a disciplined silence.83 Yacef and Drif today embody different memory traditions of the meetings with Tillion in Algiers in 1957. Analysts like Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson contrast Yacef and other militants deeply affected by the death of civilians in the bombings, to Drif, `apparently less sensitive’.84 Yacef evokes Drif’s intrepid character in his account of the Battle of Algiers written decades after 1962: Drif places her order at the Milk-Bar, `recalling the name of an iced milk drink just unusual enough to elicit the admiration of the waiter. Snobbism was the rule in the neighborhood’.85 After her arrest, Drif presented herself as a soldier in the resistance86 and today, married to one of the founders of the FLN, Rabah Bitat, she still projects the spirit of the trapped fighter with no time for the improvisation through which Yacef and Tillion built a dialogue and a relationship. Yacef and Drif appear in the recent film on the French-Algerian War, Remembering History (2004). He once again recounts his emotional response to the carnage of the Casino bombing and his desire at the time to withdraw from such violence. Drif, saying the liberation struggle was just, voices no such doubts about the tactics used to win it.87 83

For further discussion of Zohra Drif, see Donald Reid, ‘The Worlds of Frantz Fanon’s “L’Algérie se dévoile”’, forthcoming in French Studies. 84 Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 35. 85 Yacef, La Bataille d’Alger, I: 286. Although Drif had set the bomb at the Milk-Bar, she was not involved in the making of The Battle of Algiers. One suspects her comment years later that she would like to help make a really good film about the Battle of Algiers—with a director like Costa-Gavras—is a reflection of her distance from Pontecorvo’s film. Amrane-Minne, Des Femmes, 142. (Costa-Gavras had filmed Z in Algeria.) 86 Drif read André Malraux’s La Condition humaine in prison, but did not see her activism as at all like Tchen’s nihilism; she identified with World War II resisters like those who had assassinated the Czech Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. La Mort de mes frères (Paris : Maspero, 1960), 10-11. Other prisoners were struck by different elements of La Condition humaine. Henri Alleg, held at the Barberousse prison in Algiers, believes that Malraux’s works were made available to prisoners after the coup of 13 May 1958 brought de Gaulle to power and he appointed Malraux to his government. Alleg remembers how nationalist prisoners on death row identified with the Chinese Communists heroically awaiting execution. Le Siècle du dragon (Paris : Le Temps des Cérises, 1994), 147-148. 87 `Remembering History’, in The Battle of Algiers DVD. Drif has no place for the moral and humane motivations at the heart of Tillion’s and Yacef’s accounts. She explains that Yacef wanted the executions to stop to give the FLN a chance to reorganize, resupply

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Djamila Amrane, a FLN militant who set bombs and later became historian of women in the struggle, notes a change from the account Yacef wrote of the Battle of Algiers when in prison and the one he published some twenty years later, although she does not account for the shift. Gone is the climate of emotional intensity in which Yacef collaborated with his female comrades in unprecedented ways.88 Why? Drif embodies the revolutionary struggle past; Yacef now presents Tillion as opening the way to Algeria’s future. He made no mention of his meetings with Tillion in his 1962 memoir on the Battle of Algiers, but his later accounts of the Battle cover the meetings with Tillion in some detail. Yacef attributes to her a desire to meet FLN leaders in Algers and presents his contact as in line with a `seduction operation’ to win over French intellectuals.89 But she stands out in the thousand-page memoir he wrote in the 1980s as one of the French individuals whom Yacef admires and trusts. She represents the relations of equality and of respect that Algeria and France, led today by a man clearly marked by his service in Algeria, are now seeking to develop. When President Jacques Chirac spoke before the Algerian Parliament and the Senate in Algiers in March 2003, he championed construction of a special relationship between France and Algeria in which the past must be `neither forgotten nor denied’. On the tribune, Chirac engaged in long handshakes with Yacef and Drif.90 Tillion’s meetings with Yacef feature as well in the conflicts over historical memory that mark the struggle between Islamic activists and the FLN in Algeria today. Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers has been, since its release, very popular in Algiers, and is one source of Algerians’ memory of their war of liberation, a war recalled in contemporary conflicts in Algeria. The Groupes Islamiques Armées, which launched numerous terrorist attacks in Algiers in the 1990s, was led by a young militant who called himself Ali-Flicha—Ali the arrow, an implicit claim to be Ali la Pointe’s true successor.91 Abassi Madani, leader of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) characterized the Algerian Revolution as incomplete: the FLN had `physically’ expelled France, but it was up to their successors `to banish it intellectually and ideologically, to break with its supporters who have sucked its venomous milk’.92 The FIS has returned to the meetings of Tillion and Yacef to critique what it sees as the morally corrupt with explosives, and reestablish relations with the leadership in Tunis. Amrane-Minne, Des femmes, 140-141 (interview with Drif). 88 Amrane, Les Femmes, 113-114. 89 Yacef, La Bataille d’Alger, II: 381-424. 90 Le Monde, 5 March 2003. 91 Le Monde, 12 May 2004. 92 Michael Hunt, The World Transformed 1945 to the present (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), 293.

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nature of post-revolutionary Algerian society. The FIS took pleasure in repeating the charge made by General Paul Aussarasses in 2001 that Yacef was jealous of Ali la Pointe’s popularity and that to save his life he provided Ali la Pointe’s location (and did so without being subjected to torture).93 But the heart of the FIS calumny is the contention that Yacef met with Tillion to negotiate his surrender (and that Tillion met with Jacques Massu’s wife, Suzanne Massu, to negotiate Yacef’s life in exchange for revelation of Ali la Pointe’s whereabouts).94 The FIS would like to tarnish the FLN crown of national liberation; the very actions that seemed traitorous to French opponents of the FLN during the war have taken on this cast for the FLN’s Algerian opponents today. *

*

*

At one point we realized that exploding a bomb in the city had as much impact as five ambushes [embuscades dans le maquis]. If we hadn’t done it, we would still be a French colony. 95 —Yacef Saâdi How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas….Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a

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Paul Aussaresses, The Battle of the Casbah. Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Algeria/1955-1957, trans. Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2002), 162. According to Pierre Pellissier, a Euro-Algerian policeman who had played soccer with Yacef told the paras that the way to get Yacef to talk was to bring his mother to the prison to see him. She was concerned for the safety of her grandson, Petit Omar, who was with Ali la Pointe. After his mother’s visit, Yacef told questioners where Ali la Pointe was and he went with the soldiers to point out the location. Pierre Pellissier. La Bataille d’Alger (Paris: Perrin, 1995), 338-345; Pierre Pellissier, Massu (Paris: Perrin, 2003), 248-249. Marie-Monique Robin reports that in the Algiers Casbah, many still think that Yacef told of Ali la Pointe’s whereabouts and was responsible for his death; Yacef was nearly lynched on one visit to the Casbah. Escadrons, 91. However, there is no evidence to support Pellissier’s story or others premised on Yacef’s supposed jealousy of Ali la Pointe’s fame. The French military officers in charge of Yacef’s interrogation report that they did not learn of Ali la Pointe’s whereabouts from him. Ibid., 117. Yacef has always denied that he gave up Ali’s location. Yet the desire to counter such tales provides a further explanation for Yacef’s quest to make a film of his account of the Battle of Algiers. 94 Kamel O., ‘Les faussaires: Indices sur le chemin de la vérité. Faux-Moudjahidines, Yacef Saâdi, Aussaresses, Germaine Tillon [sic] et Mme. Massu’, El Minibar, 26 December 2001. 95 Robin, Escadrons, 93.

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Chapter Four plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film. —Flier for a showing of The Battle of Algiers to Pentagon special operations chiefs, August 200396 If [the Pentagon] had learned the lesson of the Battle of Algiers, well, there would have been peace in Iraq a long time ago. 97 —Zohra Drif

The French-Algerian War and Pontecorvo’s film are specters that today haunt both the right and the left. Richard Pipes recently suggested that the Russians should learn from the French experience in Algeria and grant Chechnya independence.98 Ariel Sharon, we are told, kept the preeminent history of the French-Algerian war in English, Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace, by his bedside.99 In 2007, it was reported that President George W. Bush was reading this book on Henry Kissinger’s suggestion.100 The Israeli army has arranged screenings of Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers for some of its units. The film was a touchstone for American strategists in Iraq. In September 2002, two American diplomats came to see Yacef in Algeria to talk to him about the film and to ask him to come to the United States to discuss it.101 The Pentagon arranged a showing of The Battle of Algiers for its special operations chiefs in August 2003. A few months later, former U.S. National Security advisor 96

Washington Post, 26 August 2003. When asked about this showing, Pontecorvo responded, ‘The Battle of Algiers does not teach how to make war, but rather how to make a film’. L’Humanité, 22 May 2004. 97 William Maclean, ‘50 Years on, Algiers bomber sees US “error” in Iraq’. http://www.boston.com/news/world/africa/articles/2006/09/28/50_years_on_algiers_bom ber_sees_us_error_in_iraq/ [accessed 6 November 2006]. 98 New York Times, 9 September 2004. 99 New York Review of Books, 15 July 2004, 29. In 1982, Tillion spoke out for `peace now’ in Israel. `In “occulting” a great people, one always constrains them to terrorism; but one does not suppress a terrorist organization, for, by its very nature, it is reborn from the ashes….’ `Hasten, Israelis, to scratch the word `terrorist’ from your vocabulary— you have been as much terrorists as your adversaries…. Remember that it was only twenty years ago that the model of neutrals, the champion of moral discourses, la France sage, still bleeding from two world wars, was sacrificing in Algeria a generation, massacring “for nothing” objective allies and authentic friends. The whole world weighed the folly of the combatants; they alone could not see it’. À la recherche, 392393 [1982]. 100 Horne sent a copy of the book to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 with passages on torture underlined; Rumsfeld responded with `a savage letter’. New York Times, 17 January 2007 (Maureen Dowd). 101 Le Monde, 12 May 2004. Yacef came to the United States for screenings in 2004.

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Zbigniew Brzezinski remarked, `If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers’.102 About this time, Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism expert on the National Security Council, made the same comment about what was happening in Washington. He pointed to President Bush’s practice ‘of putting X’s through the pictures of arrested or killed Qaeda managers’. It reminded Clarke of the scene in The Battle of Algiers, in which the French military is shown doing the same thing.103 The French-Algerian War and Pontecorvo’s film resonate for Europeans and American on the left today as well, but less for lessons to be learned than because they evoke a world we have lost. A Solinas of today would be hard pressed to identify the insurgency in Iraq as the revolution which would serve as a catalyst for revolution in Europe and North America. Europeans and Americans on the left (broadly defined) who think about the Battle of Algiers and its representations today are led to engage in necessary and valuable dialogues with their aspirations and desires, past and present. The philosopher Hélène Cixous, Zohra Drif’s lycée classmate in Algiers, provides an entrée to this self-questioning. Cixous thought through both her experience as an individual `born under the guise of French citizenship’—`Algeria freeing itself frees me of the sins I did not commit and which had been deposed as a poisoned gift in my cradle’—and what her experience as a Jew in Algeria during the Occupation, marked by the erasure of her rights as a French citizen, meant to her French identity, by fantasizing about writing to Zohra Drif during the Battle of Algiers. `I might have been born Zohra and I was Hélène but a bit of Zohra in me had never stopped chafing at the bit’. But Cixous understood that Drif and the few other `Muslim girls’ in her lycée could never see who she, one of the few Jews at the school, truly was: I was the one who needed them, their future freedom, so that mine would be able to blossom. I also needed in an indefinable way a discovery, a reunion, an alliance, because with them I made sense to myself. I called to them in silence and without hope. I was behind the bars of a mad destiny, cooped up with the French, my non-fellow creatures, my adversaries, my hands held out toward my 102

Christopher Farah, ‘“I killed people. I did it for my country”’. http://archive.salon.com/end/feature/2004/01/09/yacef/index_np.html. (accessed 1 June 2005) 103 ‘“Unfortunately”, Clarke continued, “after all the known Algerian terrorists were arrested or killed, the French lost. And that could be the thing that’s happening here, that even though we’re getting all the known Al Qaeda leaders, we’re breeding new ones”’. New York Times, 23 November 2003. Fairly quickly, the U.S. military in Iraq began to think of its experience in light of the French experience during the Algerian War of Independence. Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 226-227, 235, 435.

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The us Cixous discovers when she puts pen to paper forty years after the Battle of Algiers, is women fighting for liberation—the Zohra Drif who, with Djamila Bouhired, led protests against the Family Code legislation. During the French-Algerian War, Algerian nationalist combatants spoke to French activists who sought to reclaim their national identity from those they saw betraying it. Tillion was a leader in the condemnation of the inhumane acts of forces who fought in the name of her nation. Other French played an important collaborative role in the Algerian national liberation struggle and scorned the liberal Tillion. But seen from the perspective of the war in Iraq today, when there are no shared projects between the political left in the United States and Europe and the insurgents, it is hard to imagine that after the war an Iraqi resister might go to Europe in search of a filmmaker to tell his or her story, countering the divide which informs the story, and engage in an interaction like that between Yacef and Pontecorvo that led to The Battle of Algiers, so unlike either Pontecorvo’s Parà or Yacef’s original script.105 Iraq today is not Algeria fifty years ago, but Tillion’s dialogues with Algerian 104

Cixous, `Letter to Zohra Drif’, 83, 84, 86-87. Cixous mentions three Muslim girls who were her friends in lycée. Two of them, Zohra Drif and Sami Lakhdari, went to law school and are among the three women shown setting bombs in The Battle of Algiers. 105 Yacef says that it was he who insisted that Pontecorvo include the scene of the little boy with his ice cream shortly before the explosion of the bomb at the Milk Bar : `It was necessary to avoid falling into an angelic pose’. Le Monde, 12 May 2004. If so, it is evidence of the revealing exchanges between historical actors and those presenting their past in film. Pontecorvo says the Algerian authorities insisted that he cut this scene of the boy licking the ice cream, but he refused and it was retained. L’Humanité, 22 May 2004. However, the political ramifications of this scene got Yacef and Pontecorvo in trouble with the Boumedienne regime, installed while they were filming. Libération, 4 November 2004. Pontecorvo’s last feature-length film, Ogro (1979) returns to the issue of terror. It is a recreation of the Basque nationalist ETAS’s assassination in 1973 of Francisco Franco’s presumed successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. Ogro, completed in an Italy traumatized by the Red Brigades’ kidnapping and murder of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, closes with ETA leaders debating the value and efficacy of terrorist tactics, a debate one never witnesses in The Battle of Algiers. See the interview with Gillo Pontecorvo (by Corinne Luca), in Dan Georgakas and Lenny Rubenstein, eds., The Cineaste Interviews on the art and politics of the cinema (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983), 307-312; and Carlo Celli, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 89-101.

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insurgents take on a new transgressive character in the political imagination of the American and European left today, marked by the stymied desire to find fulfillment of their own longings in an insurgent other who has no place for them.

CHAPTER FIVE AVAILABLE IN HELL: GERMAINE TILLION’S OPERETTA OF RESISTANCE AT RAVENSBRÜCK

The Naturalist: Despite appearances, the Verfügbar has nothing in common with the slave of the ancient world or the serf of the Middle Ages (including those who lived on rats and dandelions, etc.). In effect, in these two professions (however decried), history and archeology attest that one could have found individuals who grew fat, or who reproduced, or who grew older—all things that can’t happen to a Verfügbar…. The Choir of Verfügbaren: I have an idea! The Naturalist: It would astonish me if it were good! But tell us just the same…. The Choir of Verfügbaren: The historians who pity the Middle Ages and Antiquity, one could send them here…. The Naturalist: Perhaps they are already here, for historians, they’re like lice, they introduce themselves everywhere…. —Germaine Tillion1 I am sure that the difference which existed between the conditions of life of a Blockova [prisoner in charge of a block] or a Lagerpolizei [camp police agent] and those of a miserable French or Russian Verfügbar were greater than those there could be between the queen of England and the most wretched-looking homeless person. [Blockovas have greater power to punish; Verfügbaren are hungrier than any clocharde.] Statistics that don’t take into account facts like these, material, moral and social, can only be absurd. —Germaine Tillion2 When we are released from Ravensbrück We will no longer be able to be Verfügbaren. Existence will be gray An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in French Politics, Culture & Society (Summer 2007). (© Berghahn Books Inc., 2007). Permission to reprint has been granted by Berghahn Books, Inc. 1 Germaine Tillion, Le Verfügbar aux Enfers. Une opérette à Ravensbrück (Paris: La Martinière, 2005), 72, 74. 2 Germaine Tillion, `À la recherche de la vérité’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 29-30.

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And will appear tawdry. We will be able to cheat when we want Without fear of getting beaten. That’s why, we will remain Verfügbar forever! —Bluette Morat3

Pierre Vidal-Naquet called the three studies Germaine Tillion published, in 1946, 1973, and 1988, on the concentration camp to which she had been sent, her `three Ravensbrücks’.4 Although resistance is important in each, these works focus primarily on the relation of exploitation to extermination in the camps. There is, however, a first, or perhaps a fourth, Ravensbrück, neither a memoir nor a history like the other three. In it, the state of resistance in which Tillion lived deportation comes to the fore.5 Inspired by Jacques Offenbach’s l’Orphée aux Enfers, Tillion wrote Le Verfügbar aux Enfers while incarcerated at Ravensbrück. Like David Rousset’s references to Père Ubu in his essay on Buchenwald, L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946), Tillion’s operetta reminds us that the genres we usually call on to present the horrific in the normal world may be lacking when the horrific is the norm. Ravensbrück operated as a labor camp, profiting from the provision of prisoners to factories in the area (although Nacht und Nebel (NN) prisoners like Tillion were barred from this labor outside the camp). Some of the elderly inmates were assigned to knitting rooms in the camp. Prisoners without fixed work postings were considered Verfügbaren, ‘available’ to be drafted into work groups. Verfügbaren without other work could be assigned the hard physical labor of camp maintenance—pulling cast-iron rollers to smooth the roads, fetching the heavy pots of soup, and removing dead bodies. In any case, there was, as the Polish prisoner Wanda Póltawska recognized, the need to maintain appearances: in a show camp like Ravensbrück, all prisoners had to work, and if there was not enough work to go round, then hundreds of women were simply given spades and put to shifting mounds of sand all day long. Each woman had a mound to shift. There was a whole chain of mounds, and no shortage of sand, since the woman next to you simply shifted her sand on to your pile all day long. And she

3

Bluette Morat, ‘Du maquis parisien au maquis de Ravensbrück’, in ibid., 144. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Réflexions sur le génocide, 3 vols. (Paris: La Découverte, 1995), III: 195-207. 5 Olivier Lalieu, La Déportation fragmentée. Les anciens déportés parlent de politique 1945-1980 (Paris: Boutique de l’Histoire, 1994), 35. 4

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As a Verfügbar in Tillion’s operetta says of Planirung, the leveling of the ground: ‘maybe it’s tiring, but at least it’s useless’, an example of the ArbeitErsatz given Verfügbaren.7 Verfügbaren were at the bottom of the very hierarchical camp social order, the sous-prolétariat of the camp8, `the lowest level of camp “galleyslaves”’, in Tillion’s words.9 The French prisoner Rosane described the Verfügbaren as ‘the army of slaves, of poorly shod ragpickers, more in rags than the others, pick and shovel on their shoulders as they march in step. [The guards] make them sing—in German—“Hé li, Hé lo…”, while the wolves growled at their heels’.10 Many Verfügbaren were Schmutzstücke, ‘pieces of jewelry’, drawn primarily from those who had been imprisoned for their ‘asocial’ behavior, Tillion believed. Schmutzstücke were totally broken, ‘dying of solitude’, with no self-respect or desire or ability to care for themselves—the female equivalent of the Musulmannen in male camps.11 For resister Denise Dufournier, they ‘constituted the camp plebeians and were treated as veritable pariahs’.12 Verfügbaren lacked the camaraderie of regular work crews. ‘Absolute insecurity’ characterized their situation; in the final months of the camp, their ranks were combed for those to be exterminated.13 ‘Prisoners’, historian Jack Morrison wrote, ‘would do nearly anything to get out of this category and into a regular job’.14 Yet there was one group of prisoners who sought to be Verfügbaren: French resisters.15 They wanted to avoid any work which would contribute to

6

Wanda Póltawska, And I Am Afraid of My Dreams, trans. Mary Craig (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1987), 44. 7 Tillion, Le Verfügbar, 142, 176. 8 Amicale de Ravensbrück et l’ADIR, Les Françaises à Ravensbrück (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 129. 9 Germaine Tillion, La Traversée. Entretien avec Jean Lacouture (Paris: Arléa, 1997), 75. 10 Rosane, Terre de cendres. Ravensbrück et Belsen 1943-1945 (Paris: Les Oeuvres Françaises, 1946), 61-62. 11 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbrück (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 194-195. 12 Denise Dufournier, La Maison des mortes, Ravensbrück (Paris: Hachette, 1945), 96. 13 Bernhard Strebel, Ravensbrück. Un complexe concentrationnaire, trans. Odile Demange (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 189, 518-519. 14 Jack G. Morrison, Ravensbrück. Everyday Life in a Women’s Concentration Camp 1939-45 (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 201. 15 Strebel, Ravensbrück, 518, identifies this behavior as particularly French.

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the German war effort, and, if possible, any work in the camp.16 Only the basfonds, wrote resister Anne Fernier, volunteered for work. 17 As David Rousset was one of the first to point out, the camps depended on eliciting collaboration from the prisoners. However, those who sought to be Verfügbaren made the refusal to collaborate a choice. They were not the lifeless downtrodden. For resister Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec, `the Schmuckstück was a failed Verfügbar. There is a column of Schmuckstücke going to dig sand, to do diverse corvées, but you will never see a column of Verfügbaren. The latter elude the blows the others don’t know how to avoid. There is a pride in being a Verfügbar, but shame in being a Schmuckstück’.18 Avoiding selection to work was a full time job—a metier19, a profession.20 ‘To remain a Verfügbar for very long required a repertoire of ruses, of complicity and of hiding places sufficient to administer an Asian province’; `it required the ruses and the energy of a Sioux chief’, Tillion wrote.21 When the majority of French resisters like Tillion arrived at Ravensbrück in 1943-44, the swelling prison population caused the earlier organization of the camp to give way to a greater controlled chaos. It was in this environment that the French resisters’ Verfügbar culture developed. Although they could be severely punished if caught, able-bodied French resister Verfügbaren hid in the lines for the hospital, then escaped as they approached the building; they disguised themselves as stooped old women and mixed in with the elderly knitters; they slipped in among the women who worked at night and went to the barracks to sleep during the day; they hid under the beds and in the washrooms. Being a Verfügbar, wrote Dufournier, was `a life full of adventure… The game consisted of eliciting this risk of no work... and in inventing to this end a thousand ingenious and dangerous strategies…. This perilous situation attracted most especially the French, who showed themselves quite crafty in the art of escaping selection’.22 For Toulouse-Lautrec, the Verfügbaren `were the queens of irregularity, of indiscipline, of sabotage by omission. They were also eternal victims’; `heroic band… eternally pursued’,

16 The resister Rosane tells of resisters trading bread for lice to assure they would be rejected for factory work. Terre de cendres, 78-79. 17 Anne Fernier, ‘Le Départ en Transport’, in Ravensbrück (Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1946), 95. 18 Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec, J’ai eu vingt ans à Ravensbrück (Paris: Perrin, 1991), 231 19 Ibid. 20 Dufournier, La Maison, 95-96. 21 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 161. 22 Dufournier, La Maison, 96.

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disappearing like a flock of sparrows at the approach of a camp supervisor.23 Those who were NN lived up to their name, disappearing like Wagner’s Alberich, when he spoke the magical ‘night and fog’ incantation. Verfügbaren eluding work could face resentment from prisoners who saw them as an extra mouth to feed or who feared being punished for not turning them in.24 Camp staff rewarded informers, but Tillion recalls other French prisoners taking pride in hiding them; no French prisoner, she says, even those in the camp for criminal offenses, informed on them.25 For Tillion, the camp, like France, was the site of a French people in resistance that sheltered a small group of resisters. Bluette Morat characterized her life as a Verfügbar as that of the maquis de Ravensbrück. It was not enough, she contended, that a small group of resisters refused to work. They needed to convince camp veterans that, by 1944, things had changed and what once seemed impossible could now be tried. New arrivals had to be convinced that joining a work group would not improve their situation. Morat was particularly angered by the argument that if they did not do the work, someone else would, and that all one could do in the camp was look out for oneself. ‘Nothing was more contrary to the spirit of [de Gaulle’s appel of] 18 June which inspired our attitude. If we had had to subordinate our efforts to their immediate efficacy in 1940, we would have had nothing to do but follow Vichy. But we were, my friends and me, more Gaullist than ever. We were so with the intimate fervor of those at the beginning, and in an irrevocable manner’. To those who said it was better to join a work group in the camp that did nothing for the German war effort than to risk getting picked up and sent to work in a factory doing war work, she responded: Beyond this war of machines and of powder, there was the horrible fight of Nazism against the human person. We saw with our own eyes, we felt in our own flesh just to what degree of bestiality these monstrous enemies debased their slaves. So we could consider that the slightest solicitation, necessarily transmitted through some Pole, holding a little of their power, therefore complicit in their crime, would be contrary to the exigencies of simple human dignity. It was better to remain among the most degraded Stück [piece, a term used for camp prisoners], always ‘available’ for a worse sort, but to owe nothing to an iniquitous organization that, for the honor of France, included no 26 Frenchwomen.

The creation and dissemination of cultural works was an important way that prisoners fended off dehumanization. French NN prisoner Paulette Don 23

de Toulouse-Lautrec, J’ai eu vingt ans, 229-231. Amicale and ADIR, Les Françaises, 252, 254. 25 Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 161-162 26 Morat, ‘Du maquis parisien’, 149-151. 24

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Zimmet explained that the older prisoners wrote poems in alexandrines, the younger in free verse. But equally important was the collective effort to reconstitute cultural works in the camp. Don Zimmet recalled that prisoners used `the therapeutic of thought work, against the hunger, the misery, the moral laxity. At freezing morning roll calls, memories of Verlaine’s verses ran through the ranks in whispered words. The poem was put together more or less well’.27 Germaine Tillion’s mother, Émilie Tillion, an editor in civilian life, and other Gaullist resisters got hold of some paper and pens, and transcribed in beautiful calligraphy the poems of Ronsard, Péguy, Claudel, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and others. The women bound the pages and circulated the texts as the product of the Éditions de la Croix de Lorraine.28 A friend of Primo Levi’s sent to Ravensbrück told him that the camp was her university.29 When Germaine Tillion and other Verfügbaren were assigned to sort through booty sent from Poland, her comrades hid her in a packing crate, where she wrote Le Verfügbar aux Enfers.30 They waited impatiently for her to emerge to read them sections; some of the songs were collective efforts, with each woman contributing a verse.31 Once completed, the manuscript circulated clandestinely in the camp. What did Tillion’s readers find so ‘side-splitting’ [tordant] in her operetta?32 Tillion was an ethnologist who had spent the six years before the war 27 Paulette Don Zimmet-Gazel, Les Conditions d’existence et l’état sanitaire dans les camps de concentration des femmes déportées en Allemagne (Ambilly-Annemasse: Imprimerie Franco-Suisse, 1946), 95. Olga Wormser and Henri Michel, Tragédie de la déportation (Paris: Hachette, 1954), 279. 28 Elisabeth Terrenoire, Combattantes sans uniforme (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1946), 113114. 29 Primo Levi, The Reawakening, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 230. 30 Writing was not Tillion’s only act of resistance during the sorting of plundered goods. Fearful of theft, the guards exercised a reign of terror. After one French prisoner was beaten to death, twenty French NN prisoners, led by Tillion, demanded to see the commander. Prisoners were amazed that he agreed to meet with them, treated them politely, and promised to speak to his overzealous employees. Odette Améry and Georges Martin-Champier, Nuit et brouillard (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1945), 122. The guard who had beaten the prisoner to death was moved. The protesters were forced to stand outside for a day without food and were deprived of food for three consecutive Sundays (but were fed by other prisoners as an expression of solidarity.) Amicale and ADIR, Les Françaises, 228. 31 Tillion, La Traversée, 74; Tillion, Ravensbrück (1988), 161; Ania Francos, Il était des femmes dans la Résistance (Paris: Stock, 1978), 421. 32 Béatrix de Toulouse-Lautrec, La Victoire en pleurant (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1981), 229.

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studying family and social life in the Aurès. She frequently spoke to the other prisoners of these experiences. In the Aurès, Tillion had been an observer and she took on that role at Ravensbrück as well, studying and documenting the camp administration. In Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, however, she reversed roles, presenting a Naturalist, who has discovered a previously unknown animal, the Verfügbar. The Naturalist plays the role of the ethnographer in a racist society. Ethnographers study humanity; he studies inhumanity. The Naturalist describes the Verfügbar as the conjugaison of a male Gestapo agent and a female Resistance.33 He describes the gestation in police custody, French prisons, and deportation. Born at the camp, the Verfügbar begins right away to show the ‘signs of that spirit of contradiction that will govern its whole life’.34 While the Verfügbaren, as individuals and as a choir, tell about their life of work and death in brutal candor, the Naturalist is uninterested or unwilling to hear them. His scientistic discourse, complete with references to ‘Lord Mayor days’, the number of days a well-fed individual could survive without food35, suggests the inability and cruelty of outsiders’ efforts to apply to the prisoners’ world conceptions and standards derived from the ‘normal’ world. The Verfügbaren and the Naturalist inhabit different cultures. He speaks of constipation, they speak of the social life in the toilets.36 They speak of what got them deported; all the Naturalist can see are the triangles they wear now. Red triangles were intended for political prisoners, but all French prisoners were assigned them, whether or not they were deported for political activities. Resisters resented sharing an identity badge with prisoners sent to Ravensbrück for other reasons, but the Naturalist cannot see this. Ultimately, the Verfügbaren speak to themselves and other prisoners, warning new arrivals of the presence of lesbians seeking their favors and of the death that awaits those who take the ‘black transports’. The Naturalist is constantly trying to discipline the Verfügbaren, working at antipodes to the spirit of liberty of the Verfügbaren, who ultimately take over the performance from him. Le Verfügbar aux Enfers is marked by the bitter humor and irony that the French in the camp saw as differentiating their way of dealing with the horrors of the camp from that of other groups: the ability to laugh at one’s situation—the fixation on food, the everpresence of death—allowed a degree both of distancing and of mastery of a situation where acts of imagination were one of the few viable responses to the unimaginable.37 A Danish resister 33

Tillion, Le Verfügbar, 30-32. Ibid., 36. 35 Ibid. 80. 36 Ibid., 88. 37 See Frédérique Neau-Dufour, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz (Paris: Cerf, 2004), 93. Deported resister and Verfügbar Nelly Gorce tells of using wit and laughter to overcome 34

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arrested with the French, and interned with them at Ravensbrück, said the French never stopped joking about their clothes or giving one another funny nicknames: `they were like a breathe of free France’. 38 No one was more adept at this than Germaine Tillion.39 During the excruciatingly long roll calls, Tillion’s companions loved to stand next to her: she ‘told them stories, amusing anecdotes. As soon as someone was near, [she] made up some joke and [she] told it to them and that amused them… quite simply, jokes, irony….’40 In Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, the Naturalist speaks of the imprisoned women’s seins (breasts): ‘They are no longer saints, but martyrs’.41 When one prisoner in the operetta asks another how, as dogs snap at them, they are to do an impossible task, another prisoner replies, ‘Ask the dog’.42 Referring to the Le Verfügbar aux Enfers, resister at Ravensbrück Anise Postel-Vinay explained that Tillion wanted her comrades ‘to make fun of [themselves]. This was typically French, to succeed in keeping [their] taste for laughter and farce’.43 At Ravensbrück, deported resisters thought about the world after Liberation. They were intent on seeing their oppressors brought to justice. Tillion herself compiled a list of the principal SS officers at Ravensbrück, coded and disguised as recipes, which she smuggled out when she left the camp in April 1945.44 And the resisters at Ravensbrück wanted their sacrifice to provide the heroic exemplar France would need to rebuild itself materially and morally. the hostility of prisoners who worked. Nelly Gorce, Journal de Ravensbrück (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995), 80. 38 Morrison, Ravensbrück, 198. The French were not the only prisoners who could take an ironic view of their situation. A Czech prisoner distributed her comic drawings of prisoners as the ‘Ravensbrück Fashion Magazine’: ‘fashion hints for the demanding inmate’. Margarete Buber-Neumann, Milena, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Arcade, 1997), 160-161. 39 For masterpieces of Tillion’s irony during the war, see Germaine Tillion, À la recherche du vrai et du juste, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 75-81 [1942]; and Tillion’s extraordinary ‘letter to a German tribunal’, written in prison in January 1943, in which she played with the mistranslations made in the accusation against her— that she had sought to ‘naturalize’ the German police and French traitors and was charged with ‘returning their innocence to members of the German police’. ‘If’, she explained, `the gentlemen of the German police have really lost their innocence, I’m incapable of returning it to them’. Ravensbrück (1988), 35-40. 40 Allison Rice, ‘“Dechiffrer le silence”: A Conversation with Germaine Tillion’, Research in African Literatures 35:1 (Spring 2004): 166. 41 Tillion, Le Verfügbar, 66. 42 Ibid., 128. 43 Rebecca Rovit, ‘Introduction’, to Theatrical Performance during the Holocaust, eds. Rebecca Rovit and Alvin Goldfarb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 7. 44 Tillion, La Traversée, 79.

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But they were haunted as well by the sense that their experience was incommunicable, that those in the normal world could be no more than voyeurs, unwilling or unable to understand their experience. Offenbach’s operetta is the tale of gods bored with life on Mount Olympus who decide to amuse themselves by going to Hades. Would that be the prisoners’ fate when they returned home, frustrated and ignored actors in a titillating story for bored ‘gods’ of the world outside the camps, and nothing more? Would even the best-intentioned listeners to their saga be no more comprehending than the Naturalist? Texts have a history. The history of Le Verfügbar aux Enfers is imbricated in the historical experience of Ravensbrück and the memory of it. In the Fresnes prison, before deportation, Tillion had, in the words of Anise PostelVinay, ‘spent her time editing her manuscript, like Rosa Luxemburg’.45 Tillion brought this material on her research in the Aurès to Ravensbrück with the expectation that she would be able to write it up while there. Ravensbrück was not as she had imagined it and her notes were lost and never recovered. In the camp, she stole paper, pens and time to make notes on the camp administration and to write Le Verfügbar aux Enfers. The text was passed clandestinely among prisoners in the camp, and smuggled out when they left. Until recently, only these prisoners had read the text in its entirety. It was an experience which bonded them—not because of the variety of arcane references—but because only they could truly understand the experience of reading such a work while in the univers concentrationnaire. Tillion spoke about the Verfügbaren and their project of resisting employment in each of her ‘three Ravensbrücks’, but she did not quote material from Le Verfügbar aux Enfers until the last Ravensbrück of 1988. She then began publishing snippets and allowing others to do so. But Le Verfügbar aux Enfers remained the archival document on Ravensbrück which had not been released. Tillion’s confrontation with Wormser-Migot allowed her to speak of the loss of her mother. Her leadership in the 1970s and 1980s in refuting the negationists, who denied the Nazis’ exterminationist project, whether in death camps like Auschwitz or labor camps like Ravensbrück, allowed her to exhume Le Verfügbar aux Enfers. If she had long feared that knowledge of an operetta written in a concentration camp would make people think that the camps were places of amusement46, she came to see that the Naturalist’s willful misunderstanding of everything he saw was like that of the negationists. The production on stage of Le Verfügbar aux Enfers in June 2007, unimaginable at Ravensbrück, marked the next stage in the revelation of a text that embodies in its history the camp experience and deportees’ memory of it. 45

Anise Postel-Vinay, ‘A Young Frenchwoman’s Wartime Experiences’, The Dachau Review 1 (1985): 221. 46 Rovit, ‘Introduction’, 10.

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The published text is a testament to the community created at Ravensbrück and its legacy. Expert textual annotation is provided by Anise Postel-Vinay; her daughter, Claire Andrieu, a prominent historian of the war and postwar period47; and Nelly Forget, member of the staff of the Social Centers in Algeria, tortured by the French army in 1957. Postel-Vinay had met Tillion on the train to Ravensbrück: ‘every day for the next eighteen months [Tillion] gave [Postel-Vinay] a piece of her own bread ration, on the grounds that [PostelVinay] was younger than her and would, as [Tillion] said, one day be going home to get married and have lots of children’.48 Tillion went to Algiers during the ‘Battle of Algiers’ and fought to get Forget released. Le Verfügbar aux Enfers tells us about what social science generally does not, and for which there is little space in the scholarly accounts of Ravensbrück other than Tillion’s. Verfügbaren are a category that could perhaps be counted and its activities listed, but there is little place for those who chose this despised status. Their choice appears in no camp records. Nor is there a place for this agency, for this resistance, in a work like Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog, for which Tillion had served as a consultant. If Tillion’s conversations with Yacef Saâdi are the missing scene we need to make sense of and to challenge the boundaries of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Tillion’s Le Verfügbar aux Enfers performs this role for another iconic film of postwar France, Night and Fog. In the face of inhumanity, Tillion remains a Verfügbar forever.

47

Andrieu led the historians’ critique of the roundtable on the Aubracs. Libération, 25 July 1997 (Claire Andrieu et. al.). 48 Postel-Vinay, ‘A Young Frenchwoman’s Wartime Experiences’, 221. In an extraordinary essay written a few years after the war, Postel-Vinay discussed such practices: `When we were giving additional soups to the youngest, aspirins to those who weren’t as sick and the better work assignments to those we thought capable of putting their privileges to the service of others, we were making, like our enemies, a real choice between women. We were coming to aid by priority those who were useful to the community and would still be on their return, and, lacking means, we were letting the mass of the others slip into a fog [un brouillard pudique]. The fascists were selecting subjects they could use, and at our level we were selecting those who could serve our community. Subject to their ethic, we were submitting our comrades to it. Woe to those who had neither muscles for the Third Reich, nor value for France…. We were accepting this hideous choice and its standards only as a provisional necessity. This had to stop with the end of the war’. `Notre Enquête’, Voix et Visages 13 (April 1948): 1-2. See also Germaine Tillion, `Le Système des camps de concentration’, Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale 6 (April 1952): 62.

CHAPTER SIX FRENCH SINGULARITY, THE RESISTANCE AND THE VICHY SYNDROME: LUCIE AUBRAC TO THE RESCUE

A decade ago, Mona Ozouf answered American feminism with a set of biographical essays of French women characterized by what she called `French singularity’. Although French women did not receive the vote until 1944, Ozouf argues that the Old Regime legacy of gender-integrated cultural practices and the republican educational model born of the universalist aspirations of the Revolution, provided French women with opportunities to realize fulfillment as individuals within a national culture that valorized gendered difference.1 French socialist Élisabeth Guigou paired Ozouf’s presentation of ‘French singularity’ and the views of the resister Lucie Aubrac, and made Aubrac emblematic of a mid-twentieth-century French woman’s (Ozoufian) self-conception as free and equal, despite limited participation in political life: ‘Lucie Aubrac is very representative of the great majority of [French] women, for whom political rights were not that important’.2 For Claire Andrieu, a French historian of the Resistance, Lucie Aubrac and other female resisters `are a good illustration of the “French singularity” that Mona Ozouf has described’.3 American researchers have contested `French singularity’ as a concept of historical analysis.4 `French singularity’ is better understood as a constituent element of French political culture, a set of beliefs widely-held by French men and women about themselves. It is a narrative strategy they use to give meaning An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in European History Quarterly 36 (April 2006): 200-220. (© Sage Publications Ltd., 2006) Permission to reprint has been granted by Sage Publications Ltd. 1 Mona Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes. Essai sur la singularité française (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). 2 Élisabeth Guigou, Être femme en politique (Paris: Plon, 1997), 82 (quoted), 83. 3 Claire Andrieu, ‘Women in the French Resistance: Revisiting the Historical Record’, French Politics, Culture & Society 18:1 (Spring 2000), 24. 4 See the issue of Le Débat 87 (November-December 1995) devoted to Les Mots des femmes.

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to the lives of exceptional French women as women, as French and as exceptional. The relation of `French singularity’ to American feminism is like that of the American `Horatio Alger’ story to French socialism. The Horatio Alger story is the essence of what many Americans believe is particular to their nation, even if it is an inadequate guide to the workings of American society. The same can be said of the relation of ‘French singularity’ to French society. This may help explain why figures like Lucie Aubrac, a woman considered by others to be an instance of `French singularity’, although she never uses the term herself, can raise such heated debates about individual and national identity. When the identity Lucie Aubrac most valued—the essence of France revealed in the Resistance—was challenged by generations born after the war, she argued that these doubts were a consequence of the failure of a collective memory of the Occupation to understand the Resistance as a revelation of France, and, as such, as a revelation of French women. Claude Berri opened Lucie Aubrac, his 1997 film adaptation of Lucie Aubrac’s memoir of her Resistance activity, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (1984), with the lycée professor Aubrac using her class in ancient history to discuss women's subordination. Although this episode is not one she mentions in her memoir, she does tell of adapting the curriculum to bring the message of the Resistance to her students in occupied France.5 Thus Berri is true to Aubrac’s pedagogical technique in having her address a crucial political issue of his day, the status of women, through his presentation (of her presentation) of the past. We too will follow Lucie Aubrac in pursuing a dialogue between her conception of the Resistance and the worlds which preceded and followed it. Aubrac wrote Ils partiront dans l’ivresse a decade after the end of the era of the `resistancialist’ myth, and in the midst of what Henry Rousso terms the ‘obsessive’ phase of the memory of Occupation. This ‘obsessive’ phase was the culmination of the Vichy Syndrome, the consequence of French society’s repression of memory of the Occupation in the decades after the war. Rousso situates the emergence of this phase of the Syndrome in the realm of politics at the end of the trentes glorieuses in 1973-4, an era not only of the Holocaustevoking threat to Israel of the Yom Kippur War, but of feminist struggles in France as well (including the leadership of Simone Weil, Minister of Health, and Auschwitz survivor—in the fight to legalize abortion, a practice which had been suppressed with particular severity by the Vichy regime). Aubrac herself had moved from disappointment with the failure of the Fourth Republic to fulfill the project of the Resistance to criticism of the post-de Gaulle Fifth Republic’s obsession with Vichy collaboration, an obsession which had little place for 5

Lucie Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté. Entretiens avec Corinne Bouchoux (Paris: Archipel, 1997), 78.

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memory of la France résistante. Lucie Aubrac was not a public spokesperson for the memory of the Resistance in the 1950s and 1960s, decades of widespread French affirmation of their nation as a nation of resisters. She assumed this role only after the soixante-huitard generation had embarked on a sustained questioning of resistance as the essence of French experience during the war. Ils partiront dans l’ivresse is Lucie Aubrac’s reassertion of both the sui generis French Resistance culture and the liberation she believes a French woman of the time could not find outside of it. She answered the Vichy Syndrome insistence on wartime France as attentiste or worse with the Gaullist representation of a people in resistance that included a wide swath of French women, as well as men. Post-war representations of the Resistance gendered male, she affirmed, had obscured the true extent of active French opposition to the German Occupation. This failure to acknowledge the full breadth of la France résistante had contributed to the inability of the postwar polity to bring to fruition the social and political projects of the Resistance. Lucie Aubrac’s placement of women at the core of an extensive unrecognized resistance reiterated the radical difference of the Resistance from the male world of political institutions of the Third and Fourth Republics, and countered the emphasis in post-`resistancialist’ historiography on divisions among Resistance movements. Narratives of national identity celebrate the popular roots of a national hero(ine) like Lucie Aubrac. They also require the appearance of compatriots who are not themselves iconic figures like Aubrac, but who manifest characteristics found in such iconic figures and who can instinctively recognize with warmth their country(wo)men who have realized the particularity of their national culture. Ils partiront dans l'ivresse inverts the course of Lucie Aubrac's life, moving from the Lyon Resistance, populated by well-educated left activists, to the inhabitants of rural communities of la France profonde, the world of her childhood. There Lucie Aubrac found a community committed to resistance, including peasants, bourgeois, and gendarmes. Women were wellrepresented. Aubrac’s people in resistance are embodied in Ils partiront dans l’ivresse by three elderly sisters, with an old dog they named Maréchal, who sheltered Lucie Aubrac and her family, as they had sheltered many resisters before: `In the eyes of these such courageous women’, Lucie Aubrac said of the sisters and the women of their village, ‘I was a heroine, but they themselves were extraordinary’.6 6

Ibid., 126-127. Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, translation of Ils partiront dans l’ivresse by Konrad Beiber and Betsy Wing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 213-218. On these three women, see also Emmanuel d'Astier, Seven Times Seven Days, trans. Humphrey Hare (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 93ff.

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Lucie Aubrac presented the central chapter of her Resistance experience in Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, but gives the fullest narration of her life in Cette exigeante liberté (1997). This work can be read as a story, suffused with elements of `French singularity’, of a young woman for whom class difference was more apparent and confining than gender difference, and who thought interwar feminism a bourgeois affair. Lucie Bernard—she took her husband’s Resistance name Aubrac after the war—was born in 1912 into a family of vinedresser sharecroppers in a Burgundy still recovering from the phylloxera epidemic. Her father experienced shellshock during World War I and was placed in a psychiatric asylum in Lyon. The family lost contact with him. He was declared dead and Lucie Bernard and her sister were recognized as pupilles de la Nation, war orphans given a state pension. Lucie Bernard's mother continued to search for her husband and refused the title `war widow’. Shown a newspaper with photographs of unidentified men in 1921, her mother recognized her husband and brought him home.7 Family head during the war, Lucie Bernard’s mother retained this position after her husband's return because of his diminished capacity. `Curiously’, Lucie Aubrac recalls, `my father was convinced that I was a little boy. His mistake may quite well have played a role in my upbringing’. 8 He seems to have taken literally the appellation garçon manqué others gave his daughter.9 Class identity and difference were evident to the adolescent Lucie Bernard. In a story of social injustice, which she tells more naturally than those of gender injustice, Lucie Aubrac recounts that until she was eleven, her family lived on the estate of the Countess de Barbentane. Her father was the gardener; her mother was the milkmaid. As a child, Lucie curtsied to the Countess. In a gesture of charity, Lucie was paired with the Countess’ daughter at her first communion.10 One day the Countess' parrot escaped, and she offered a reward for its capture and return. Lucie's father found the bird and gave it to Lucie to bring back to the Countess. But the parrot bit Lucie's finger, the blood stained the Countess' carpet, and the irritated Countess forgot the promised reward. Lucie's parents, their honor offended, left and rented a small plot of land for market-gardening near Montceau-les-Mines. Lucie’s patched dress gave her the appearance of the poorest of the poor and the teacher put her in the back of the class. But she was a good student and 7

Isabelle Juppé, De mémoire de grand-mères. Le XXe siècle raconté par celles qui l’ont fait (Paris: Grasset, 1995), 25-27. This experience constitutes the archetypal French story of gender and the memory of World War I. See Jean-Yves Le Naour, The Living Unknown Soldie , trans. Penny Allen (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 8 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 13. 9 Ania Francos, Il était des femmes dans la Résistance (Paris: Stock, 1978), 166. 10 Whether Aubrac could have taken communion with the Countess’ daughter has since been questioned because of the difference in the two girls’ ages.

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Lucie’s mother saw her success in school as the key to family security, not to her daughter’s liberation. Lucie’s mother decided that Lucie should become a school teacher; this would assure that her daughter would be able to support her parents in their old age. They were very pleased when Lucie passed the exam for entrance into the female teachers' college in 1929. Her mother borrowed money to get her nice school clothes, but Lucie rebelled at the idea of spending three years confined in a boarding school and withdrew. Her angry parents kicked her out of the house and she did not see them for four years. Yet her mother never told anyone that Lucie had not gone to the école normale d'institutrices. Over the years she spun tales of her daughter’s experiences at the teachers' college and as a schoolteacher. `It's not impossible’, Lucie Aubrac reflects, `that I got from her a certain capacity to get back on my feet, even in extreme situations, like those which I had occasion to face during the Resistance`. 11 Lucie Bernard left home for Paris, where she got a job in a restaurant near the Lycée Chaptal. The professors she met as a waitress took her under their wing, lending her books and helping her prepare for entrance to the university. She passed her baccalauréat and went on to the Sorbonne, where she joined the International Circle. `At the International Circle, I met youths from other countries, products of a social and cultural milieu more privileged than mine. Through them, I brushed shoulders with a bourgeoisie to which French society, with its class barriers, did not give me access’.12 Class difference was ingrained in the France she knew: `The codes of bourgeois savoir-vivre, which cannot be improvised and the apprenticeship of which comes, on the contrary, from a slow and deep impregnation at the time of early childhood, were wanting in me’.13 She was `more attuned to social inequalities than to the fate of women’: ‘I wasn’t aware of not having the right to vote. I had always followed electoral campaigns, played an active role in them. I even attended vote counts. It’s odd, I never had the sense that I was missing anything’.14 She told Guigou in 1996: I found a little ridiculous [the suffragette] Louise Weiss and those elegant young women who wore hats and chained themselves to the gates of the Senate. For me, it was a fight of bourgeois women. I found the situation of workers much more dramatic than that of feminist bourgeois women. The female workers who struck on May 1 were risking prison while the suffragettes did not risk much. For me, the essential was elsewhere—in the struggle against fascism. In 1936 I campaigned on

11

Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 25 [quoted]; Juppé, De mémoire de grand-mères, 34-35, 87-91. 12 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 29. Most Jews Lucie knew in the 1930s were foreigners. For her, French Jews were part of the bourgeois world she did not frequent. Ibid., 38-39. 13 Ibid., 33. 14 Ibid., 143-144.

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a bicycle for Jean Zay in the Orléannais. I participated in that campaign without thinking that I was not going to vote.15

At the Sorbonne, Lucie Bernard was active in a group, `The Poor Students’, because, unlike most of her schoolmates, she had to support herself.16 She worked as a telephone operator and as a nursery school teacher.17 Some time in the Jeunesses Communistes can be seen as preparation for her performances during the war. When she told her story in 1978, she suggested that what would make her a good resister was not allegiance to Marxism or to the Communist Party, but a soixante-huitard anti-authoritarianism: Me, I've never read Marx. And it was not in the Jeunesses Communistes that I could have acquired the least theoretical formation. We were then a little like the youths of May 1968: gauchistes, you know! Adepts at direct action, blows. We sold L'Avant-Garde in front of churches, and at Christmas, once, we bought pigeons and attached to their feet two small flags, of course with the inscription: “Religion is the opium of the people”. At the height of midnight mass, at the Jeanne-d'Arc Church in the thirteenth arrondissement, we let them go at the elevation. But best of all, it was the young Polish emigrant women, trained in clandestine methods, who taught us: we made flags with antimilitarist slogans; we tied them with thread to stones and hung them over the tramway tracks at the Boulevard Port-Royal. Only the firemen could get them down. 18

But `little by little, these stories of profits, of the dialectic, all this got on [her] nerves’ and Lucie Bernard resigned, refusing `embrigadement’ in the Jeunesses Communistes,19 as she had refused that at the teachers’ college. Lucie Bernard incarnated the Third Republic's self-representation as a meritocracy rooted in the peasantry. Her decision to pursue liberation by attending university rather than teachers’ college is her own version of the `not yet, but soon’ mantra of Ozouf’s accounts of `French singularity’. While working in Paris, Lucie Bernard received her certificat d’histoire and was eventually awarded a fellowship that allowed her to prepare successfully for the very competitive agrégation masculine to qualify for advanced study, rather than the agrégation féminine most women took to become a teacher.20 While doing graduate work in history at Strasbourg, she taught in a lycée. Lucie Bernard had never attended a lycée, an 15

Guigou, Être femme en politique, 81. Francos, Il était des femmes, 166-168. 17 Juppé, De mémoire de grand-mères, 90. 18 Francos, Il était des femmes, 168. See also Victor Leduc's praise of Lucie Aubrac's `unheard of audacity’ selling L'Avant-Garde at the Saint-Michel metro. Les Tribulations d'un Idéologue (Paris: Syros, 1985), 31. 19 Juppé, De mémoire de grand-mères, 88-89. Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 8. 20 Andrieu, ‘Women in the French Resistance’, 24. 16

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institution reserved for the elite in the inter-war years. She was very aware that having missed lycée, she lacked her peers' familiarity with elite culture: `All my life, I've had to try to reappropriate all this by myself, as an autodidact’. When she began teaching at a lycée, she took the unusual step of getting permission to attend classes with her students in order to prepare for the bac in science. 21 Lucie Bernard pursued her graduate studies and was awarded a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to research her thesis on the settlement of the southern Rocky Mountains. She prepared to leave for the United States in September 1939.22 Friends introduced her to Raymond Samuel, a military officer and engineer from a Jewish merchant family who had just returned from studies in the United States. They fell in love and married. She took her husband’s name. Different religious origins and, more importantly for Lucie Samuel, a different class background, receded before the couple’s deeply shared allegiance to the France born in 1789. She put away her visa to go to the United States in order to stay in a France at war. Raymond Samuel was mobilized and captured by the Germans in June 1940. Two months later, his wife’s daring intervention with the authorities, the first of three times during the war, led to his escape. Lucie Samuel got permission to see her husband in the prisoner of war camp. There she passed him a few pills of the hormone which women took to lose weight, but that caused men to break out in a high fever. After she left, Raymond Samuel took the pills, came down with a fever, and was transferred to a hospital by the Germans, who were fearful of contagion among the prisoners. Lucie Samuel visited her husband in the hospital, slipped him a pair of workmen's overalls, and distracted the German guard while waiting for Raymond to climb over the wall to a car outside the hospital. They escaped to Lyon. 23 With the annexation of Alsace by Germany, the university in Strasbourg moved to Clermont-Ferrand, one of the first centers of resistance. There Lucie Samuel encountered the philosopher Jean Cavaillès, a friend from Strasbourg with whom she had taught lycée. Cavaillès introduced her to the journalist Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie. Together they launched a resistance group in 1940, the predecessor to Libération-Sud, which Lucie Samuel cofounded with d'Astier de la Vigerie in 1941. Lucie Samuel and her husband lived in Lyon, capital of the Resistance. Raymond Samuel became a leader of 21

Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 23, 24 [quoted], 180. A few years later, Marc Bloch wrote Lucien Febvre that if he were young, he would go to the United States and devote three years to researching the settlement of the United States: `What a fascinating subject! And one that only an historian conversant with the rural realities of our old land would be capable of doing well’. Marc Bloch to Lucien Febvre, 17 October 1942, in Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Correspondance, ed. Bertrand Müller (Paris: Fayard, 2003), III: 222. 23 Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, 19-20. 22

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Libération-Sud and an organizer of the Resistance Armée Secrète. He was known in the Resistance as Aubrac. After the war, the Samuels took the name Aubrac, and it is as Lucie Aubrac and Raymond Aubrac that they are known today. The Aubracs’ household, composed of two working parents and a young child, played a special role for resisters. Their descriptions of the Aubracs’ home in Lyon during the Resistance are of an environment crucial in creating the conditions for a republican community—the spring (le ressort), to cite Montesquieu (via Ozouf).24 Resisters constituted a `network of friends’ who sang, ate and discussed together. Fellow résistante Simone MartinChauffier reports that Lucie Aubrac `let forth in a loud voice droll opinions in crude, unanswerable language’. 25 `We weren’t pisse-froid’, Lucie Aubrac recalls. `All of this did not prevent us from loving life and loving to laugh’.26 She proved gifted at organizing the basics of underground life—getting information for false papers and pursuing successfully `the permanent search for provisions’.27 Her specialty become organizing and conducting escapes from prison, planning those, among others, of Serge Ravenel and Maurice KriegelValrimont in May 1943 and Robert Kahn in September 1943.28 Resisters with whom Lucie Aubrac worked during the war identified her not as the woman of the feminist future, but as the woman who fitted the ‘French singularity’ narrative and came to the fore in the alternative public sphere of societies in crisis. For Alban Vistal and Marcel Ruby, Lucie Aubrac resembled a Valkyrie29; for d’Astier de la Vigerie, she was `an Amazon with a history degree’,30 `the Théroigne de Méricourt of Libération’31; `our Joan of Arc’.32 `When one knows Lucie Aubrac’, wrote resister André Frossard, `one understands better Joan of Arc’.33

24

Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes, 329. Simone Martin-Chauffier, A bientôt quand même… (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1976), 229. 26 Pierre Leenhardt, Pascal Copeau (Paris: Harmattan, 1994), 142. 27 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 78 28 Gabrielle Ferrières, Jean Cavaillès. Un Philosophe dans la guerre 1903-1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 162. 29 Alban Vistel, La Nuit sans ombre: Histoire des Mouvements Unis de Résistance, leur rôle dans la libération du Sud-Est (Paris: Fayard, 1970), 75, 312; Marcel Ruby, La Résistance à Lyon, 2 vols. (Lyon: Hermès 1979), I:178-179. 30 d'Astier, Seven Times Seven Days, 32-33. 31 Francis Crémieux, Entretiens avec Emmanuel d'Astier (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1966), 83. 32 Marie-Louise Coudert and Paul Hélène, Elle la Résistance (Paris: Messidor, 1983), 145. 33 André Frossard, La Maison des otages (Paris: Fayard, 1960), 71. 25

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Lucie Aubrac’s reputation as an `Arsène Lupin in skirts’ comes from her role in the story she told of her husband’s escapes in 1943.34 The French police arrested Raymond Aubrac in March 1943. In early May, Lucie Aubrac went to the French prosecutor in charge of his case and told him that Raymond Aubrac was an emissary of de Gaulle and invented the threat that if he was not released, the prosecutor would be executed. Raymond Aubrac was freed shortly afterwards. Calling on past experience, Lucie Aubrac arranged for those who had been arrested with her husband to be slipped pills with the hormone intended for women that would give men fevers. Then her groupe franc, a unit that specialized in immediate action like sabotage and freeing prisoners, masqueraded as French and German police and went to the hospital to liberate them. Raymond Aubrac was arrested again in June 1943 with Jean Moulin and other Resistance leaders. To visit German officers in charge of her husband’s case, Lucie Aubrac tells of assuming, ‘by a sort of will of “social revenge”’, the identity of the daughter of the Barbentanes, the family of the escaped parrot. She felt an aristocratic pedigree would impress the German officers.35 Lucie Aubrac was pregnant and claimed that Claude Ermelin (Raymond Aubrac's cover identity) was the father. She explained that she wanted to make him carry out his promise to marry her in order to assure her child’s legitimacy. (This was not the first time she had posed as a prisoner's fiancée; she had done so for Cavaillès in 1942.36) Lucie Aubrac’s manipulation of identities was something everyone in the Resistance did in one way or another. Other resisters’ cover identities were defensive in nature—to be used if they were caught. Lucie Aubrac had a different relationship to the identities she assumed. She adopted them not to evade the police, but to establish relations with individual police officers so that she could see them again. German officers apparently believed her story and accepted bribes to take Raymond Aubrac from prison to sign a marriage contract. Lucie Aubrac’s groupe franc planned an attack on the van that took her husband from the prison. When Serge Ravenel, leader of the groupe franc, was injured shortly before the scheduled attack, Lucie Aubrac rallied the remaining men and saw the action through to success in October 1943. As workers at the tobacco factory on the Boulevard des Hirondelles got off from work, her men killed three German soldiers in the prison van and liberated fourteen prisoners. The Aubracs and their young son spent the next several months sheltered by people in the countryside until they could be flown to England in February 1944. 34 François Delpla, Aubrac: les faits et la calomnie (Paris: Le Temps des Cérises, 1997), 100. 35 ‘Aubrac-Amouroux: un face-à-face pour l'Histoire’, Le Figaro magazine, 12 April 1997, 155. Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 19-20. 36 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 74.

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In London, Lucie Aubrac became emblematic of the résistante. She had co-founded an important Resistance movement; freed a Resistance leader, her husband; and was the republican mother who had trumped Vichy discourse on the family, giving birth to her second child days after being flown to London. Lucie Aubrac told journalists in London in March 1944 that with millions of French men in enemy hands, `there are probably more women than men in the resistance movement.... women are playing more or less the same part as men [in the Resistance]; when it comes to deceiving the Germans theirs is an even greater part’.37 The Consultative Assembly accorded women suffrage in March 1944 and in his Free French radio broadcast of 24 March 1944 Maurice Schumann assured listeners that this was an expression of French national culture by evoking Lucie Aubrac, who had been given a parliamentary seat allocated to the Mouvements Unis de la Résistance (MUR) (as justification for her airlift to London). Lucie Aubrac was not a feminist, Schumann told listeners. She was not an agent of a gender revolution, but of a restoration of the France marked by what Ozouf would term‘French singularity’: Undoubtedly you picture her—especially if you are listening to me with a man's ears—as an aging suffragette who takes vengeance on life for her heart's disappointments. But no! Lucie Aubrac, daughter of vine-dressers, certainly is a university agrégée; but, if she teaches history and geography, that did not stop her from having a husband and two children, and from having the air of a mother of a family more than of a professor. You look at this woman. You can picture the home where you grew up close to another Frenchwomen who looks like her a little bit, and who—undoubtedly like her—lost sleep at the idea that her boy was going to catch a cold. You look at her and you can imagine her with a knitting needle or, at most, with a piece of chalk in her hands. And then, one suddenly learns that, a couple of weeks before, what she had in her hands was a tommy-gun, that she was the leader of a 12-man action group, of 12 soldiers who ripped 14 patriots from the Gestapo's claws. And then, you learn that among these 14 released Frenchmen was her own husband, Raymond Aubrac, now himself also a member of the Assembly, and that—the day she opened fire on the German guards to liberate him—she was already expecting her second child. Now one understands all, all in a single glance, what the French Resistance is, and why it is; the heroism of heroes, of heroines, who are not heroes at all, nor born heroines, who fight and will fight to the last nail, the last tooth, for their land, like Lucie Aubrac for the dignity of the centuries she has the mission to teach; for their happiness, like Lucie Aubrac for her husband; for their future, like Lucie Aubrac for her children.

37

‘Women of France. Brave Parts Played by Resisters’, The Times, 24 March 1944.

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Schumann then went on to recount what Lucie Aubrac had said to Allied reporters about French women in the Resistance: how women had freed prisoners and taken great risks to care for the children of parents murdered by miliciens. I was just watching her tell a few dozen Allied journalists about France. In the same place, eloquent men would have made them understand France. She, without eloquence, was making them feel it, touch it. And then, [the journalists] spoke to her of the maquis and Lucie Aubrac responded: “We don't want our guys to look like bandits. We don't even want to give that pleasure to their slanderers. So, in the surrounding villages, the women mend their precious clothing, wash what remains of their linen. You know that it isn't easy in France to do all this: the thread, the soap, the fabric, all this, it's a problem”. “It’s dangerous, in France. It is not easy in France”. And she has a way of saying all this that respects France so well! This country where, as she said, there are more female resisters than male resisters quite simply because more women are there than men.38

A wife and mother who rescued her husband, Lucie Aubrac turned the cult of domesticity and maternity against its purveyors in the Vichy Regime, putting it at the heart of Resistance culture. With Liberation, Schumann concluded: It is [the French woman] who will teach us how to unite to face real problems, rather than to tear ourselves up over false ones. We must form a French community worthy of the groupe franc of Lucie Aubrac where, as she said with a smile, “a Communist and a boy saying his prayers were fighting side by side!” 39

Women resisters were presented as a key to a unified France of the future, precisely because in the past women had lacked political rights and the divisions that came with their exercise. Several decades later, Lucie Aubrac interpreted in this light the prewar absence of most French women from French political life as assuring their distance from the appeals of fascism:

38

‘Lucie to the Rescue’ is the title of an American comic book presenting Lucie Aubrac’s Resistance activities that concludes with her completing her Resistance work by talking to Allied journalists in London. True Comics 49 (May-June 1946). 39 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, ed., Ici Londres 1940-1944 (Paris: Documentation Française, 1975), 220. In Ils partiront dans l'ivresse, Pascal Copeau, Libération-Sud leader, explains to Lucie Aubrac that she was a perfect choice for the Assembly: ‘you're not just a revolutionary; you are also a university agrégée and a history teacher; you're married and a mother; you're of Burgandian Catholic extraction. What more could they want?’ Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, 187.

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In my opinion, feminine individualism—I am speaking of France—kept many women from joining a political party and it is probably for this reason that they were not conquered, but on the contrary critical and clear-sighted, in the face of ideologies and their applications in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.40

For Lucie Aubrac, such an expression of `French singularity’ was a fundamental contribution of women to political life. In July 1944, Lucie Aubrac was sent back to France with the mission of putting in place departmental liberation committees and explaining their mission.41 In 1945, Aubrac wrote that women in the Resistance `know how to stay charming and feminine, but they have acquired qualities of initiative, endurance and seriousness that they did not have before the war’.42 `A young woman, who had abandoned her battledress for a little dress with flowers, with only an ordre de mission, had the power to transfer a prefect. I felt myself to be invulnerable’, she later recalled.43 `No one was astonished that a woman—a woman of 32—installed a new Liberation mayor or dismissed a prefect.... I represented Free France, that was all’. 44 Lucie Aubrac was one of the resisters nominated by their movements from whom the jury in the trial of Marshal Pétain would be selected. When his counsel exercised the right to eliminate her, she responded, `I thank the defense which shows that it has confidence in my patriotic sentiments’.45 She took her seat in the Provisional Consultative Assembly in Paris and gave one of the first speeches by a woman in the French parliament. 46 Yet, in keeping with the ideology of `French singularity’, Lucie Aubrac resented being labeled the first woman parliamentarian; she represented the Resistance, not women. 47 In London, she had refused to see the leading French feminist (and anti-Gaullist) Louise Weiss when she called on her.48 Weiss in turn blamed Lucie Aubrac, `une pétroleuse 40

Lucie Aubrac, ‘Présence des femmes dans toutes les activités de la Résistance’, in Les Femmes dans la Résistance: actes du colloque, Paris, La Sorbonne, 22 et 23 novembre 1975, tenu à l’initiative de l’Union des femmes françaises (Paris: Rocher, 1977), 19. 41 Charles-Louis Foulon, ‘Les femmes dans les comités départementaux de Libération: quelques données pour des recherches futures’, in ibid., 275; Francos, Il était des femmes, 375; Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 145-148. 42 French Women Today (New York: French Press and Information Service, 1945), 13. 43 Lucie Aubrac, ‘Un Témoignage’, in La France de 1945 (Caen: Université de Caen, 1996), 16. 44 Francos, Il était des femmes, 376. 45 Jacques Isorni, Philippe Pétain, 2 vols. (Paris: Table Ronde, 1973), II:472. 46 Débats de l’Assemblée Consultative Provisoire (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1944), I: 296 (17 November 1944). 47 Aubrac, ‘Présence’, 21. 48 Louis Aubrac now expresses regret for instructing her secretary to tell Weiss she was out. Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 140.

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communiste ou communisante de la Résistance’, for having spread rumors in the fall of 1944 about her actions during the Occupation. Weiss believed that these rumors deprived her of `a great political role’ as leader of the assembled feminist forces and broke the ‘feminists’ élan’.49 Lucie Aubrac’s La Résistance (1945) places women at the core of the Resistance. She begins with women’s central role in the often ignored foundational challenge to authority upon which the Resistance rested—the freeing of prisoners of war from German control in 1940.50 She presents the Resistance as a congeries of ways to outwit police while communicating clandestinely—a social world below the surface which she genders female. The heart of every resistance narrative is the resister’s discovery of others who would resist and the effort to stay in contact with them. Of the Resistance use of clandestine postal boxes to correspond—women were frequently given the job of delivering this mail—she wrote: `In provincial villages... the Resistance used those mail boxes which had served before the war for clandestine loves’. 51 Early individually typed Resistance tracts `resembled “love chains” of peacetime periods and ended like them with an invitation to reproduce and diffuse’.52 She evoked the Resistance as the celebration of a clandestine love—`the secret life of all of France, like that of a woman who has a hidden love taking the best of her time and of her love’. 53 A female resister knew how to use male politesse to her advantage: Once, when delivering [clandestine] letters in a section of Lyon I knew well, I heard a car motor. In fact, there were two cars. Now there were few cars still circulating: most were used by the Germans. So I stopped and unhooked my stocking. When I got to the end of the passageway I asked the two men there to turn around so I could adjust my garter belt. While they did I disappeared. 54

49

Bibliothèque Nationale de France N.A.F. 17799 Louise Weiss, `Notes et documents pour Les Mémoires d’une Européenne’, folio 244. Weiss sought unsuccessfully to establish a jury d’honneur to contest what she believed were Lucie Aubrac’s calumnies. Ibid., folios 245-255. 50 Lucie Aubrac, La Résistance (Naissance et organisation) (Paris: R. Lang, 1945), 17-19. Germaine Tillion refers to the French women who `invented’ the Resistance by organizing escapes of prisoners of war. Germaine Tillion, `Sylvette Leleu’, Voix et Visages 217 (November-December 1989): 2. 51 Aubrac, La Résistance, 51-52. 52 Ibid., 46. 53 Ibid., 9-10. 54 Margaret Collins Weitz, `Lucie Aubrac: Femme Engagée`, Contemporary French Civilization 15 (1991): 96-97. In 1945, Lucie had told this story about Paulette, the secretary of Balmont (Raymond Aubrac). La Résistance, 52-53.

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And when the resisters needed to move a radio transmitter, a female schoolteacher and her sister put it in a baby stroller and pushed it past German soldiers armed with submachine guns, who cleared the way for them.55 Later, speaking the language of `French singularity’ in response to the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome, Lucie Aubrac contended that responsibilities in the Resistance were distributed `without the least sex discrimination, but according to what appeared to be the best use of abilities and aptitudes’. 56 Like virtually all prominent female resisters, Lucie Aubrac held no official position in her organization: `I did not handle a particular function’, she explained in 1992. `You have to put yourself fifty years ago. At that time, one did not give a particular mission to a woman.... I did a little of everything.... You did not find women in clearly determined positions’.57 She suggested that `because women were less formally engaged in the movement [and lacked] a precise function and set responsibility’, their resistance was more prone to `instinctive and spontaneous gestures that there had not been time to decide and prepare rationally’.58 The Resistance fostered opportunities for revelation of political power outside of electoral and dynastic politics, a power whose presence is at the core of the concept of `French singularity’. ‘I created a resistance network. I always felt like a citoyenne even when not having the vote’, Lucie Aubrac explained.59 Noting that figures like Lucie Aubrac `did not have well-defined functions in their organizations’, Laurent Douzou writes: `In a time of peace and codified exercise of democracy, this situation would have marginalized them. But clandestinity obeyed particular rules of operation. The weight of each depended less on their explicit attributions than on their ability to convince others’.60 `I think that the Resistance brought a profound and radical change in women's mentalities and motivations’, Aubrac averred. `Women did not hesitate to take, decided to take, responsibilities in clandestine groups and in those that issued from the Resistance’.61 They did so, Aubrac affirmed, without challenging the unity of the Resistance. Claire Gorrara rightly refers to the `disparity between historians’ later feminist recuperation of the Resistance and the negation of gender specificity by those women who 55

Aubrac, La Résistance, 70-71. Aubrac, `Présence’, 20. 57 `Récit d'une femme en résistance. Entretien avec Lucie Aubrac`, Historia spécial 20 (November-December 1992): 37. 58 Lucie Aubrac, ‘De l’engagement instinctif à la morte apprivoisée’, in Le Courage, ed. Pierre Michel Klein (Paris: Autrement, 1992), 165. 59 Guigou, Être femme en politique, 82. 60 Laurent Douzou, `La Résistance, une affaire d’hommes?’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 31 (October 1995): 22. 61 Aubrac, ‘Présence’, 21. 56

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participated in the Resistance’.62 If women did certain jobs, there were, Aubrac proudly states, no women's Resistance organizations. But Lucie Aubrac also came to see that it could be difficult for later generations to comprehend the exercise of political power by a woman without a political title. `What irritates me’, she said of Berri’s Lucie Aubrac `is that you finish the film believing that if I was a résistante, it was for love’.63 In 1997, the journalist Gérard Chauvy published a book elaborating on charges imprisoned Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie had made earlier against the Aubracs. Chauvy disputed Lucie Aubrac’s account of freeing Raymond Aubrac, suggesting that he had traded information for his first release in the spring of 1943 and that she had betrayed Jean Moulin to secure her husband’s later release.64 Chauvy read Ils partiront dans l’ivresse not as an account of Lucie Aubrac’s rescue of a leader of the Resistance, but as an effort forty years later to rescue her husband’s (and her own) reputations. Lucie Aubrac responded to this calumny by suing Chauvy for defamation of the Resistance. His lawyers unsuccessfully contested her right to file suit on the grounds that she did not represent the Resistance since she had not held an official position within a Resistance movement and had, they contended, acted more as a `femme amoureuse’ than a résistante.65 `I am not a feminist in the way suffragettes were before the War...’, Aubrac tells us,66 and she gives an interpretation of women’s emancipation and the

62

Claire Gorrara, Women’s Representations of the Occupation in Post-’68 France (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 27. See also Hanna Diamond, Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints (London: Longman, 1999); Douzou, `La Résistance, une affaire d’hommes?’; Mechtild Gilzmer, Christine Levisse-Touzé and Stefan Martens, eds., Les Femmes dans la Résistance en France (Paris: Tallandier, 2003); Margaret L. Rossiter, Women in the Resistance (New York: Praeger, 1986); Paula Schwartz, `Redefining Resistance: Women's Activism in Wartime France’, in Margaret Higonnet, et. al., eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 141-153; Paula Schwartz, `Partisanes and Gender Politics in Vichy France’, French Historical Studies 16 (Spring 1989), 126-151; articles in Françoise Thébaud, ed., `Résistances et libérations: France, 1940-1945’ in Clio: histoire, femmes et société 1 (1995); and Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1995). 63 F.Q., `L’affaire de Caluire, version Berri’, Témoignage chrétien 2748 (7 March 1997): 15. See also `Lucie Aubrac. Une vie de résistante’, Famille et éducation 407 (May 1997): 3436. 64 Gérard Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997). 65 L’Humanité, 20 February 1998 (Jean Morawski). 66 Claire Gorrara, `Reviewing Gender and the Resistance: the Case of Lucie Aubrac’, in The Liberation of France: Image and Event, ed. H.R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 151. Lucie Aubrac speaks of the `the risk of appearing suffragette’ in suggesting that

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Resistance which is similar to the interpretation Ozouf gives of women’s emancipation and the Revolution. It was the basis of liberation, although backward steps followed Liberation.67 France at Liberation moved away from the culture of the Resistance and in so doing reaffirmed a gender hierarchy, all the more difficult for Lucie Aubrac to accept, having lived outside of it in the Resistance. She tells of coming across a man sporting FFI (Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur) insignia who was shaving the head of a woman accused of having slept with a German during the Occupation. He refused Aubrac's request that he stop: `That day, I understood what is meant by machismo’. She doubts the man had stood up to the Germans during Occupation or that `authentic resisters’ participated in such head shavings. 68 She came to see tondues as part of a postwar coding of `collaboration’ in feminine terms—and of the Resistance as masculine. As a senator, Lucie Aubrac was `the very face of the Resistance’, according to Libération-Sud comrade Pascal Copeau in 1945.69 Yet she did not return to parliament, and would contend in response to the Vichy Syndrome decades later, that the unity and élan of the Resistance dissipated as parliamentary rule saw the reestablishment of a `masculine atavism’ that the Resistance had kept at bay70: `as soon as political groups formed, they were constituted by old parliamentarians who could have been only men because women were ineligible before the war. The old political formations took up their old habits; there was not really place for us in their history’.71 After the war Lucie Aubrac led the Femmes de Libération Nationale, the feminine branch of the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN). (Women’s resistance groups appeared only after the war.) In 1945 she launched a women's magazine, Privilèges des femmes, with the goal of preparing women to participate in the Republic: `When I wanted to start this journal, I felt myself to be fully a citizen of my country, equal to a man. I wanted to teach women what they didn't know because they had never voted’.72 Both the the experience of women in the Resistance could speak to French society in the 1970s. Aubrac, `Présence’, 21. 67 Recently, Lucie Aubrac evoked her conflicting views at Liberation as an historian, who saw radical social change, and as a woman, who saw women’s action in the Resistance as insufficiently recognized. `Table ronde’ in François Marcot, ed., La Résistance et les Français: lutte armée et maquis (Besançon: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, 1996), 485. 68 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 146-147. See Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France, trans. John Flower (Oxford: Berg, 2002). 69 Pascal Copeau, `Onze femmes dans un palais antiféministe’, La Femme 4 (30 April 1945): 4. 70 Aubrac, `Présence’, 21. 71 Aubrac in Lucie Aubrac, Yvonne Dumont and Annie Hervé, ‘Aux armes, citoyennes’, in ‘La Résistance: ses héros, ses histoires’, Nouvel observateur 16 hors série (1993): 57. 72 Francos, Il était des femmes, 380.

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Femmes de libération nationale and Privilèges des femmes collapsed in the face of the restoration of the party system. Lucie Aubrac agrees with the generation of historians of women that emerged at the same time as the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome in the 1970s and 1980s, when they say that the work of women in creating the conditions for resistance and women’s participation in the Resistance has been overlooked. However, she suggests that this was not a characteristic of the Resistance, but of the memory of the Resistance, that is to say of the postwar regression. In London in 1944, Lucie Aubrac had sought to refute pétainiste arguments that French women were taken in by the Vichy embrace of the family.73 She revisited this later in rejecting the gendering of collaboration as feminine that was characteristic of the postwar effort to repress memory of the Occupation. In the post-de Gaulle Fifth Republic, Lucie Aubrac contended that only attention to women’s previously unrecognized role in the Resistance would reveal the true nature and extent of the Resistance and provide the evidence necessary to counter the Vichy Syndrome obsession with the French during the Occupation as attentiste and pétainiste.74 In 1993, she suggested that the very nature of women’s important contribution to the Resistance may have given it characteristics that made it difficult for academic historians to assess and comprehend fully: ‘The participation of women gave the Resistance its breadth and its depth…. Because the men were absent… women found themselves on the front line in the face of injustices, of arrests….Their mobilization was more a movement of the heart, an instinctive revolt more than the result of political reasoning’.75 The political disappointment that emerged after Liberation, which fellow traveler Lucie Aubrac would have explained in the late 1940s as the result of the failure to create a front of the left, she re-framed fifty years later in Cette exigeante liberté as a failure after the war to build upon a resistance not expressed in political terms, or upon a resistance expressed in political forms which deviated from established norms. Intervening in a new historical context, Lucie Aubrac voiced criticisms of the Communists she would not have made a half century earlier. Aubrac now held the Communists primarily responsible for the failure of 73

See Miranda Pollard, Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France, 1940-1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 74 Paula Schwartz has pointed to French Communists’ emphasis after the war on women’s participation in the Resistance as a means to counter the identification of the Resistance with a single man, de Gaulle. `La répression des femmes communistes (19401944)’, Les Cahiers de l’IHTP 31 (October 1995): 25-37. Fifty years later, Lucie Aubrac’s emphasis on women’s participation in the Resistance was a means to criticize identification of the French with Pétain in Vichy Syndrome accounts. 75 Aubrac, Dumont and Hervé, ‘Aux armes, citoyennes’, 54.

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Privilèges des femmes.76 As she explained in 1997, the emphasis after Liberation on the military model of leaders and movements replicated the male-coded ordering of society that had accompanied Liberation, and which could not recognize women’s resistance, `the hidden face of the Resistance’77: This is a purely masculine vision of things. Women were resisters by instinct. For a man, it is very difficult to understand what could push a woman to enter the Resistance. It was not always patriotism. It was more by exasperation faced with someone who you had not invited and who slept in your bed, opened your pantry... and settled in! Women were incensed by the cheek of the Germans and worn out by the never-ending lines, the empty stores where they treated you like next to nothing if you couldn't pay more.... Many entered the Resistance because of that. ....To do the history of this feminine insubordination will be very difficult. Women are also the victims of general ideas: a women who lodges a maquisard, feeds him, is doing a humane act. Another value is not given to this act. This everyday Resistance is not very médiatique. However, to stand in line to bring clothes to prisoners, to wash them, to bring them back, may have saved the lives of men who, without that, would perhaps have spoken or committed desperate acts.... All the men who, without women's visits, would have been filthy before the judge and made a bad impression on him.... .... Our society does not confer [on men and women] the same roles and does not valorize their acts in the same way. 78

To another interviewer, Lucie Aubrac remarked, Consider all the farm women who hid the supplies that had been parachuted.... When the Germans found Allied materiel these women were killed or deported; their farms burned. And yet they took that risk. Now men don't generally consider that heroism. But that is unjust. I believe the peasant woman—who must have been frightened for she knew that there were twenty containers of Allied arms to be picked up a few at a time in the months to come—was much more courageous than say someone involved in the sort of things that I did with our armed group. The

76

Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 29, 31, 38, 151, 158, 159, 162, 167-169, 171-172, 197. Ibid., 127. Yet memory of the Resistance in military terms was at the heart of the recognition of Lucie Aubrac’s Resistance work after the war. Schwartz posits that, along with the actions of a few other résistantes, Lucie Aubrac's exceptional role as a commander in life-and-death decisions led contemporaries to claim `that women had participated in the [Resistance] on equal footing with men.... [W]omen played an important role because they were like men’. `Partisanes’, 126. In Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, Lucie Aubrac recounts sharply rebuking a male resister for calling her a `man’ for the nature of her work in the Resistance, thus differentiating her from women. Outwitting the Gestapo, 194-195. 78 Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 128-129. 77

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peasant woman had to be permanently courageous. This is much more difficult than direct action, which is generally done by teams, and over almost immediately.79

Lucie Aubrac reiterated in a new environment her presentation in London a half-century earlier of women’s role as the `essential links of the Resistance’80: a weapon used against the Vichy Regime became a defense against the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome. It was not only the nature of collaboration whose memory had been repressed after Liberation; it was the nature of the Resistance as well. Lucie Aubrac turned on Vichy Syndrome activists their failure to appreciate the role of unsung women in the Resistance. This failure, Lucie Aubrac contended, was a central element of the history of the Occupation repressed after Liberation—an instance of the very evasion that memory militants so loudly decried when pointing to other events during the Occupation that had been forgotten. If the political culture that emerged in France after the war could be criticized for failing to live up to the promise of the Resistance, Lucie Aubrac eventually came to see the Resistance as so exceptional that a politics built on the experience required re-thinking. Although Lucie Aubrac remains at a distance from contemporary feminism, she now recognizes it as a politics appropriate for the society sans Resistance culture today. Some forty years after the war, Aubrac offered an American interviewer a sensitive assessment of her own lack of awareness of the subordination of women—one in which she made an analogy between French Jews who were not fully cognizant of the fate of Jews in occupied France and her own ignorance of women’s oppression. Assimilated Jews, like her husband’s parents, could not understand the nature and consequences of antisemitic policies in occupied France until it was too late. They died at Auschwitz. Lucie Aubrac recognized that framing her life in the `French singularity’ narrative had made her oblivious to the extent of gender discrimination: It took the French some time to realize that people were being deported, that a genocide was under way. If it took me some time to become aware of women's problems that can probably be attributed to my freedom. I was one of a few women to have the agrégation before the war. With my Resistance record and the Croix de Guerre I was admitted to meetings, solicited to participate. Both in my professional and personal life I have always been free. But that was not the case with many women. So with my daughters I rejoiced when the women's movement took off in '68. If I were younger I would have joined the MLF [Women’s Liberation

79 80

Weitz, `Lucie Aubrac’, 96. Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 127.

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Movement]. But I do what I can, which is bearing witness to the past; which marks the present as well as the future. 81

Not surprisingly, it is American interviewers who led Aubrac to rethink her investment in a particular narrative of `French singularity’. In 1977, she told another American historian: `We, the women of the Resistance, we lost our battle for liberation.... If I were younger, I would protest with the MLF’.82 Feminist admirers of Lucie Aubrac today want to feel that they would have been resisters had they been born earlier; she suggests she would protest with today’s feminists had she been born later. Each admires traits found in the other. In 1978 Aubrac explained to a French interviewer, `We believed that our individual stories were exemplary. We believed in parties, in the number of deputies. The new thing with neo-feminism is that women are trying to fight together’.83 Aubrac never suggests she would abandon an outlook framed in terms of `French singularity’ for feminism, but her experience of `French singularity’ was as a historically situated culture rooted in the aspirations and deceptions of the Resistance and of the republics that preceded and followed it. The Resistance had a place for `French singularity’: this had prevented Aubrac from seeing the extent of women’s marginalization in France, and led her to interpret shaved heads, the lack of appreciation of women’s role in the Resistance, and the questioning of her Resistance activities decades later as manifestations of currents outside the true France found in the Resistance, where `French singularity’ could come to the fore. Lucie Aubrac embodied a `French singularity’ narrative before the war and in the Resistance. After the war, she experienced the resisters’ disappointment with the Fourth Republic. At the time she explained this in fellow traveler terms. But when Lucie Aubrac returned to the issue in a culture suffused with the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome, she went back to the theme of her talks in London in 1944 to contend that the important role of women in the Resistance had been forgotten. She believes the postwar failure to recognize women’s role in the Resistance is less attributable to Resistance machismo (a trait she places outside the true Resistance) than to the Fourth Republic repression of the memory of collaboration, exemplified by gendering it female in the tondue. Although women received the vote in 1944, the re81

Weitz, `Lucie Aubrac’, 99. Rayna Kline, `Partisans, Godmothers, Bicyclists, and Other Terrorists: Women in the French Resistance and Under Vichy’, in Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 10-12 November 1977 (Santa Barbara: Western Society for French History, 1977), 381. 83 Francos, Il était des femmes, 469. 82

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establishment of the parliamentary system did not provide women the kind of liberation that some had experienced in a France in resistance. If the Fourth Republic failed to respond to the hopes of the Resistance, the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome marked a new period when many in the post-de Gaulle Fifth Republic repudiated the utopian epic of the Resistance. Since the 1970s, the French have been inclined to make the war years resemble their own dystopic era. Lucie Aubrac’s presentation of women as the heart of the resistance is a response, a gender-conscious, if not explicitly feminist, reprise of the Gaullist people in resistance. She recognizes that if `French singularity’ fit her life, it may have blinded her to the experience of women in twentiethcentury France. The struggle against the Vichy Syndrome denigration of the Resistance in turn made Aubrac more receptive to the women’s liberation movement, whose predecessors she had scorned as a young woman.

CHAPTER SEVEN RESISTANCE AND ITS DISCONTENTS: AFFAIRS, ARCHIVES, AVOWALS AND THE AUBRACS

Because you have the training of an historian, you build yourself a rational view of the Resistance, a very intellectual view, that you round out much too sentimentally because you have taken part in certain of the events. And in the pain you have known, in the actions you have lived, in the people you have kept company with, in the results you have obtained, you create for yourself a collection of memories and ideas which correspond a little too much to personal sentiment. —Lucie Aubrac1

Charles de Gaulle fostered the myth of a people in resistance as crucial to the resurrection of an independent France after Liberation. Mourning for defeat, dishonor and deportations was left unfinished. Confrontation with the repressed memory of wartime collaboration awaited de Gaulle’s defeat in 1969 and his burial at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises the following year. Then that which was dead, collaboration, reappeared, but because it had never been properly interred it took the form of specters. Henry Rousso brilliantly examined how French inability and unwillingness after the war to confront French wartime collaboration and its consequences contributed to what he termed the Vichy Syndrome, leading a generation after the end of the war to an obsession with the Vichy regime. This in turn fueled doubts and suspicions about all the elements of French behavior during the Occupation, including even Vichy’s ‘other’ that had never died, the Resistance. Those haunted by Vichy came to believe that if Vichy was not as it had been forgotten, the Resistance was not as it had been remembered. It had its ghosts and those too had to be summoned. To lay to rest the Resistance

An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in Journal of Modern History 77 (March 2005): 97-137. (© University of Chicago Press, 2005) Permission to reprint has been granted by the University of Chicago Press. 1 Lucie Aubrac, La Résistance (Naissance et organisation) (Paris: R. Lang, 1945), 9.

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and its ghosts today has proved no less difficult than to exorcise the specters of Vichy. 2 ‘For many French, especially the young’, Éric Conan wrote in 1997, the Resistance ‘is often illustrated by the celebrated epic of the Aubrac couple’, Lucie Aubrac and Raymond Aubrac. It ‘has acquired an emblematic status’. The story of Lucie Aubrac’s role in arranging her husband’s escape from the Gestapo has been recounted in her memoir, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (1984) and in Claude Berri’s film, Lucie Aubrac (1997). Conan lamented that the recent deaths of several great figures of the Resistance had met with general indifference, while the Aubracs were ‘omnipresent’.3 The Aubracs’ story—for how do we make of the past a viable, transmissible memory except through stories?—is the reason why Lucie Aubrac is now the third most recognized Resistance figure in France, after Charles de Gaulle and Jean Moulin. Would the history of the Resistance be much different if the Aubracs’ story was shown to be untrue? No, but the representation of the Resistance would be. Examination of conflicts in the France of the Vichy Syndrome among resisters, investigative journalists, academic historians and the courts—all contesting who may tell the story of the Resistance and how— allows us to explore the ways in which debates about history and memory in ‘the era of suspicion which seems to characterize our decade’4,—an era cast adrift by the end of the Cold War—foster identities and competing claims to legitimacy. *

*

*

For each resister, the Resistance was a way of living, a style of life, an invented life. Thus it remains in the resister’s memory as a period of an unique nature, incongruous to all other reality, without communication and incommunicable, almost a dream. 5 —Jean Cassou

2 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Éric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998); Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 1998). 3 L’Express, 27 February 1997, 101. 4 Christian Bougeard and Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘La Résistance et l’histoire, passé/present’, Les Cahiers de l’IHTP 37 (December 1997): 32. 5 Jean Cassou, La Mémoire courte (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2001), 39. This text was originally published in 1953.

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Memory of the Resistance today shares characteristics of the memory of another seminal event of the modern French republic, the Dreyfus Affair in the 1930s. Lucie Aubrac reflects that her teachers had been adolescents during the Dreyfus Affair and had been profoundly marked by this experience: ‘All the examples they gave us to think about on the subject of liberty were tied to the Affair.... All of my civic apprenticeship was done in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. I knew the name of Francis de Pressensé, one of the founders of the League of the Rights of Man, the very image of the great man.... Such was the terreau [compost] where my thought and my passion for action were fed’.6 As a teenager, Lucie Aubrac took no interest in the string of moderate governments of the 1920s, but ‘felt very concerned by the Dreyfus Affair’.7 Well after the war, she would became vice-president of the League of the Rights of Man. Lucie Aubrac is ever the child of the Dreyfus Affair and wants succeeding generations to be ever the children of the Resistance. But the 1930s, as the original dreyfusards passed away, saw a crisis in the League over inheritance of the legacy of the Affair, not unlike that which emerged decades after the Liberation among those claiming allegiance to the Resistance.8 The Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) program of March 1944 announced that the ‘combat mission should not end with Liberation’.9 For many resisters, the Resistance remains a living experience. The projects and hopes it raised have not been realized and to consign these hopes to history would be to abandon the life commitment that gave birth to their resistance. The Resistance is an unfinished French revolution. For resisters, the Resistance is an on-going movement, not something from which France can separate itself without extraordinary loss. The danger is not that close historical analysis will yield unpleasant facts so much as that the very process of historical investigation suggests a dissociation from the Resistance. Memory can only be repressed, but history can be forgotten. When Lucie Aubrac talks of ‘bearing witness to the past; which marks the present as well as the future’, 10 she is less concerned with a moral devoir de mémoire than with affirmation of a political project. Resisters suffer as the Resistance moves from a site of pilgrimage—where salvation from 6

Lucie Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté. Entretiens avec Corinne Bouchoux (Paris: Archipel, 1997), 22. 7 Ibid., 27-28. 8 Wendy Ellen Perry, ‘Remembering Dreyfus: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the Making of the Modern French Human Rights Movement’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998). 9 Claire Andrieu, Le Programme commun de la Résistance (Paris: Éditions de l’Érudit, 1984), 168. 10 Margaret Collins Weitz, ‘Lucie Aubrac: Femme Engagée’, Contemporary French Civilization 15 (1991): 99.

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contemporary ills can be achieved through a voyage to commune with its relics—to a tourist trip, an interesting visit from which voyagers return not cured, but refreshed. If the postwar mythe résistancialiste sought to relegate Vichy to a parenthesis, resisters in turn now fear that the Resistance will be relegated to the same grammatical sarcophagus. In 1939-1940, Lucie Aubrac made three crucial decisions about her future: she married Raymond Samuel (who would adopt his Resistance name, Aubrac, after the war), entered the Resistance, and abandoned archival academic history for a career as a history teacher. She co-founded the Libération-Sud resistance movement in 1941. When Combat, Libération-Sud and Franc-Tireur accepted fusion of their paramilitary groups in November 1942, Raymond Aubrac played an important role in the creation of the Armée secrète, paramilitary arm of the Resistance movement. After his arrest in March 1943, Lucie Aubrac tells of threatening the French prosecutor with execution by the Resistance in order to win her husband’s release. Raymond Aubrac was arrested again three months later with Jean Moulin and other Resistance leaders at Caluire. Lucie Aubrac recounts the visits she made under an assumed identity to see German officiers with the story that the individual they held (Raymond Aubrac) had seduced her—she was visibly pregnant with their second child--and that she wanted to have a civil marriage to assure her child’s inheritance rights. This gave her the opportunity to work with Libération-Sud militants to engineer Raymond Aubrac’s escape, leading to her evacuation to London with her husband and her child in February 1944. She gave birth to her second child days after arriving in London. There she was struck by the difference between the Free French in exile and the Resistance inside France: ‘To see all those men in uniform and braids irritated me. As an historian, I could not stop myself from thinking of the émigrés in Coblenz who, during the Revolution, waited in châteaus for the hypothetical return of the monarchy and the Old Regime’.11 A few days before the Allied landing in Provence in August 1944, de Gaulle named Raymond Aubrac regional commissioner of the Republic for six departments in southeastern France. In the words of one French officer, Aubrac arrived in a Marseilles ‘in full revolution’.12 Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, cofounder of Libération-Sud, described the prefecture in Marseilles in early September 1944 as populated by common people who had taken up arms, ‘the living images of 1793’, and by party politicians, wary of the ‘too generous, too revolutionary or too anarchical’ Resistance: ‘Only [Raymond] Aubrac delighted in it. In the room in which had gathered what might have passed for a Committee of 11

Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 138-139. Charles-Louis Foulon, Le Pouvoir en province à la Libération: les commissaires de la République, 1943-1946 (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1975), 232-233.

12

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Public Safety, everyone was emaciated, ill-clothed and exultant’. 13 For Raymond Aubrac, seeing ‘militant workers in mansions of the palace of the Republic, this was a new spectacle and, for a militant of the Resistance, a comfort and an encouragement’.14 He worked well with the resurgent Communist party, which was not, he believed, trying to take power (saying it could have done this in Marseilles if it had wanted.)15 In the Marseilles region, Aubrac held, ‘things happened exactly as foreseen in the thought of the Resistance and in that of General de Gaulle and the authorities in Algiers’.16 But this was not de Gaulle’s interpretation. When he visited Marseilles in mid-September, he felt that ‘an air of tension and almost oppression hung over [the city]’ and he was shocked by the Communists' ‘anonymous dictatorship’ in the midst of disorder.17 Lucie Aubrac described de Gaulle's response to the ‘exuberant reception’ given him in Marseilles: There was a tremendous parade of Maquisards, wearing pretty tattered civilian clothes—real sans-culottes!—most of them with open collars, for it was a very hot day, and with flowers tied to their rifles. And they dragged along a German armored car, and on top of it were a lot of young Marseilles women in somewhat frivolous and not quite modest summer dresses, screaming and waving flags—a really nice bit of Mediterranean exuberance. And, do you know, de Gaulle took it very badly indeed; he sat there glumly, muttering: Quelle mascarade, quelle mascarade!18

A luncheon followed. Knowing de Gaulle's concern for protocol, Raymond Aubrac had intended to surround the general with ministers and prefects. Without telling her husband, Lucie Aubrac switched the name cards so that de Gaulle was seated with leaders of the Resistance and of the army born of the Resistance, the Forces Françaises de l'Intérieur (FFI). De Gaulle, she believed, should have the chance to talk to people he did not see all the time.19 13

Emmanuel d'Astier, Seven Times Seven Days, trans. Humphrey Hare (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1958), 178. 14 ‘Notes par Raymond Aubrac sur sa prise de pouvoir et sur quelques aspects de son administration’ [1973] in Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille (Paris: Hachette, 1974), 200. 15 Ibid., 201. 16 Raymond Aubrac in ‘Débat’, in Le Rétablissement de la légalité républicaine (Paris: Documentation Française, 1991), 244. 17 Charles de Gaulle, The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, trans. Jonathan Griffin and Richard Howard (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 681. 18 Alexander Werth, France 1940-1955 (Boston: Henry Holt, 1956), 228 19 Aubrac, Où la mémoire s’attarde (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 146; Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté, 153. When Raymond Aubrac presented the general secretary of the CGT Union départementale Lucien Molino to de Gaulle at the prefecture as having been at the head of

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De Gaulle evoked a people in resistance not within a revolutionary narrative, but as the basis of a political project to restore honor and order in France. As regional commissioner, Raymond Aubrac flew to Paris to talk to de Gaulle about raising salaries in Marseilles. De Gaulle asked him to lunch and proceeded to recount a ‘thrilling’ history of national unity: ‘Louis XI, Henri IV, Louis XIII, Louis XIV, Louis XV. Reaching Louis XVI, coffee was served’. 20 Lucie Aubrac's 1945 history text, La Résistance, offered a complementary historical antecedent: the esprit frondeur of the French made it natural for them to pursue ‘a war which resembled a little that of mazarinades against the German occupiers’. 21 It was precisely the world of mazarinades that so bothered de Gaulle in his visit to Marseilles—and to which he saw himself as a solution. However, Raymond Aubrac saw honor and order on a new foundation, rather than an old order being restored. Before withdrawing, the Germans had blown up a significant portion of the docks of Marseilles and wrecked many industrial enterprises. In order to jumpstart production, keep the economy out of American hands, and make use of workers’ enthusiasm in liberated Marseilles in September-October 1944, Raymond Aubrac liberally applied a July 1938 law on the organization of the economy in wartime to requisition fifteen large enterprises, many of whose directors had disappeared or were imprisoned for collaboration.22 Although the most important and widespread form of collaboration in France had been economic, punishment for economic collaboration throughout France was quite limited, on the grounds that a more extensive purge would hinder reconstruction. However, Aubrac considered his requisitions as being in line with the ‘founding of a veritable economic and social democracy’ called for in the March 1944 CNR Program: requisition offered a chance for France to resurrect itself rather than simply the insurrection in Marseilles, de Gaulle responded with irritation, ‘I don’t like gang leaders [chefs de bande]’. An angered Molino responded, ‘Me, I don’t like generals’. Jacqueline Cristofol, Batailles pour Marseille (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 186. Claude Mauriac reports that de Gaulle hauled Raymond Aubrac ‘over the coals’: ‘You distress me, A[ubrac]. You represent the State. You owe it to yourself to fulfill your mission’. Claude Mauriac, The Other de Gaulle, trans. Moura Budberg and Goron Latta (New York: John Day, 1973), 30. 20 Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 148. 21 Aubrac, La Résistance, 19. The mazarinades were scurrilous tracts written to protest the policies of the advisor to the regent, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, during the Fronde, the midseventeenth century protests against the monarchy’s centralization of power and financial exactions. 22 Robert Mencherini, La Libération et les entreprises sous gestion ouvrière. Marseille, 1944-1948 (Paris: Harmattan, 1994). See also Jean Domenichino, ‘Marseille: Les Usines réquisitionnées’, Cahiers d’histoire de l’Institut Maurice Thorez 7 (1973): 161-177; and Adam Steinhouse, Workers’ Participation in Post-Liberation France (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2001).

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reconstruct the economic world of the late Third Republic. In making these requisitions, Aubrac introduced an innovative form of worker participation in management that was absent from the 1938 law.23 Signs went up on factory walls that read, ‘The idea of service replaces henceforth the idea of profit’.24 Aubrac’s controversial policy, which Herbert Lottman sees as ‘the most radical... attack on industrial collaboration’ in France, the work of ‘a revolutionary at heart’, created the conditions for high productivity to contribute to the war effort.25 For historian Pierre Guiral, ‘the requisitions generated a clear enthusiasm which led to acceptance of overtime, diligence without faltering, and accelerated cadences’. 26 Other regional commissioners were aware of the controversy caused by the requisitions in Marseilles, but as one of them, reflecting on the Aubracs' Resistance activities, concluded: ‘You couldn't ask people who did such brilliant exploits to have a petty-bourgeois mindset’. 27 In only a few months Raymond Aubrac established the authority of the provisional government before both the Americans and the Communists, introduced order and justice into the potentially anarchic purge in the region, and spurred the region’s economy. Yet, for de Gaulle and his government in Paris, Marseilles was ‘le bordel’ and the requisitions were ‘disguised nationalizations’. Historians Robert Mencherini and Christian Oppelit write of the central government’s ‘somewhat apocalyptic vision of the Marseilles region which they thought on the brink of secession’.28 Marseilles Socialists attacked Aubrac for his close relations with the Communists; de Gaulle relieved Aubrac of his post as regional commissioner in January 1945. Aubrac’s administration was emblematic of the difference that elements of the interior Resistance briefly introduced into the French polity. Guiral describes Raymond Aubrac with a series of negatives: ‘He is not the traditional haut fonctionnaire and even less the opportunist politician whose kind have proliferated in the Midi; he is not a technocrat... any more than he is Saint-Just’. But, Guiral continued, Aubrac's powers and responsibilities diminished ‘as centralization regained its old habits’. 29 Marseilles Communists, with control of 23

Raymond Aubrac, ‘Témoignage’, in Claire Andrieu, Lucette Le Van, and Antoine Prost, eds., Les Nationalisations de la Libération: De l’utopie au compromis (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1987), 110. 24 Antoine Prost, ‘Le Retour aux temps ordinaires’, in ibid., 94. 25 Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: Morrow, 1986), 213-214. 26 Guiral, Libération, 131. 27 Foulon, Le Pouvoir en province, 233-234. 28 Robert Mencherini and Christian Oppetit, ‘Les Bouches–du-Rhône’, in Philippe Buton and Jean-Marie Guillon, eds., Les Pouvoirs en France à la Libération (Paris: Belin, 1994), 522. 29 Guiral, Libération, 114. See also Hilary Footitt and John Christopher Simmonds, France 1943-1945 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 154.

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the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), strongly supported the requisitions, but national Parti Communiste Français (PCF) and CGT support was tepid. The Communists feared that the requisitions would scare peasant and middle-class voters whom the party hoped to attract, and that requisitions in the provinces would interfere with the party’s fundamental project of nationalization of primary sectors of the economy: ‘Faced with the avant-gardisme and the independence of Aubrac, the Communist Party refused to abandon the axis of its politics which remained centralizing and was then very Jacobin’.30 Raymond Aubrac proudly quotes de Gaulle's assessment in his memoirs that Aubrac ‘found it difficult to adopt the psychology of high officialdom’.31 What made him such a successful Resistance leader, Aubrac believes, citing de Gaulle’s comment, may have made him neither the model Gaullist nor model Communist official at Liberation.32 He refused de Gaulle's offer of pantouflage into prestigious positions in the state or the private sector, which he later termed manifestations of the establishment's ‘capacity for absorption’. He explained that such co-optation made resisters after 1945 and later their counterparts in national liberation movements in former colonies turn away from the commitment to social justice that had previously motivated them.33 Aubrac took direction of the operation to remove land mines that had been laid in France, and he has continued for more than a half-century to play an active role around the world in forwarding land mine removal.34 After a stint in a Communist-affiliated business organization, Aubrac served as an economic consultant in Morocco from 1958 to 1963, before going to work for the Food and Agricultural Organization in 1963. In 1945, Lucie Aubrac and other Libération-Sud leaders in the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (MLN) were active in the unsuccessful effort to forge an alliance between the MLN and the Communist Front National, which was intended to create a Resistance-backed political movement that would challenge the return of a party-based political system like that of the Third Republic—a development already apparent in the Consultative Assembly, in which 30

Foulon, Le Pouvoir en province, 235-236. See also Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘“Parti du mouvement” et “parti de l’ordre”’, in Buton and Guillon, eds., Les Pouvoirs, 50 31 de Gaulle, Complete War Memoirs, 681; Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 167. The experience of resister and regional commissioner at Lyon, Yves Farge, is comparable to that of Raymond Aubrac. See Claude Morgan, Yves Farge (Paris: Éditions Français Réunis, 1954), esp. 120121, on de Gaulle’s visit to Lyon in September 1944. Farge presented resisters to de Gaulle. When de Gaulle asked where the ‘authorities’ were, Farge responded, ‘They are in prison, General’. Georges-Marc Benamou, C’était un temps déraisonnable. Les premiers résistants racontent (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1999), 192-193n. 32 Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 358. 33 Ibid., 228. 34 Daniele Voldman, Attention Mines 1944-1947 (Paris: France Empire, 1985).

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Lucie Aubrac sat.35 The Aubracs also took a leading role in other failed attempts to create movements that would bring the culture of the Resistance into the PCF and the values of the PCF into non-Communist Resistance movements.36 Historians would later emphasize divisions within the Resistance during the war, but for the Aubracs this fragmentation particularly characterized France after Liberation. Resisters like the Aubracs initially repressed or redirected the impetus of the unfinished revolution of the Resistance in the interests of rebuilding France, but in the decades since the emergence of what Rousso terms the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome, they have placed the continuing nature of the Resistance at the core of their political activity. The Aubracs’ life in resistance has made many demands on them in recent years. In 1996, they joined intellectuals, including resisters Stéphane Hessel, Germaine Tillion, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, to intervene as a ‘college of mediators’ in the highly charged affair of the sans-papiers, foreign residents without legal documentation. That year the Aubracs also coauthored an essay on the American ‘experiment in the recolonization of the world’: reviewing the effect of economic sanctions in Iraq, they noted that ‘the usual lesson givers in human rights’ seemed to have ignored that 560,000 children died in Iraq in the first five years after the end of the Gulf War. Recalling that the Nazis had delineated Jews as Untermenschen, the Aubracs and their co-authors were sure that ‘if we let 560,000 dogs die, we would certainly see a great public protest…. But here, it is a matter of Iraqis’.37 In 2001, Lucie Aubrac was a leading voice among those she termed the ‘volunteers of An II’ in the presidential campaign of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, which she presented as continuing the work of the Resistance: if the resisters had to unearth the Republic, Chevènement needed to give it a good dusting (but she warned Chevènement not to align himself with the French Right).38 Raymond Aubrac joined Hessel in a group of French observers that visited Palestine in January-February 2003 and denounced the conditions in which Palestinians were living as incompatible with basic human rights. 39 Hessel, the Jewish resister deported to Buchenwald, and Aubrac, the Jewish resister whose parents died at Auschwitz, exercised their right as 35

Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer, Les Résistants. De la guerre de l’ombre aux allées du pouvoir (1944-1989) (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 41. 36 Ibid., 49-50; Jacques Vaudiaux, Le Progressisme en France sous la 4e République (Paris: Cujas, 1968), 41-44; Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944-1958, trans. Godfrey Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52-53. 37 Le Monde, 19 January 1996. 38 Libération, 21 January 2002. 39 Le Monde, 5 February 2003. In August 2006, Aubrac and Hessel took the lead in signing a petition of French Jews against Israeli military action in Lebanon. Libération, 9 August 2006; Le Monde, 12 August 2006.

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resisters to serve as a moral conscience in a particularly highly charged political situation. In March 2004, the Aubracs were among thirteen resisters invited by the Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières pour l’Aide aux Citoyennes et Citoyens (ATTAC), a movement for democratic control of financial markets and the institutions of globalization, to a meeting marking the sixtieth anniversary of the CNR program: the goal was to draw from the program the inspiration necessary, in Raymond Aubrac’s words, ‘to regain confidence in our collective capacities’.40 The Aubracs do not want the Resistance to become history (in the colloquial American sense). It can only avoid this fate if it is not only continually told, but also continually acted. This brings Resistance memory today into conflict with the Vichy Syndrome. Both the Vichy Syndrome and memory of the Resistance are a living of the present with constant reference to the past, but while the Vichy Syndrome is a judgment of a past that can never be overcome, the memory of the Resistance sustains a past that can never be surpassed. *

*

*

It seemed to us, in effect, that this was an affair [that of René Hardy] which only those who had participated in the action could have understood and in a strict sense judge. I said to myself that the expeditious method of a jar of preserves [with which Lucie Aubrac had been authorized by her Resistance organization to poison Hardy in 1943] was, despite its cruelty and possible injustice, a thousand times more normal than this discussion in a courtroom, made for other purposes, before a public, the vast majority of whom were ignorant of these situations and not one of whom could have said what he himself would have done in similar circumstances. —Claude Bourdet 41

Rousso astutely makes the Pantheonization of Moulin in 1964 the final major event before the breaking of the mirror that the premier resister, de Gaulle, had afforded the French: they looked at him and saw themselves as a people in resistance. Breaking this mirror eventually unleashed the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome. Ladislas de Hoyos compares the French fascination with Moulin’s capture at Caluire in June 1943 with the endless reexamination of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the United States 42: these events are given the power to reveal the hidden causes of ills which have plagued France and the United States ever since. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the French 40

L’Humanité, 13 March 2004. Claude Bourdet, L'Aventure incertaine (Paris: Stock, 1975), 231-232. 42 Ladislas de Hoyos, Klaus Barbie, trans. Nicholas Courtin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 73. 41

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Communist Party, the effort to root out Communism has become inextricable for many from analysis of the Resistance. Jean Moulin, the iconic figure who unified the Resistance movements and had relations with the Communists before and during the war, is presented variously as an agent of the Soviets or of the Americans, or as a victim of missteps of and/or dealings with Soviet or American agents.43 The central figure in all accounts of the betrayal of Moulin is René Hardy. Though accused of responsibility for the Gestapo’s arrest of Jean Moulin in June 1943, he continued to be trusted and protected by his Resistance organization, Combat (which had illicitly invited Hardy to Caluire to bolster its hand in negotiations with Moulin and members of Libération-Sud, including Raymond Aubrac). Hardy was brought to trial in 1947 and again in 1950 for betrayal of Moulin, and was acquitted both times, despite the appearance of new evidence after the first trial which forced Hardy to admit he had earlier lied about being picked up and held by the Gestapo and identified as a Resistance leader. The Aubracs never doubted Hardy’s guilt and Lucie Aubrac had gotten permission to poison Hardy after the arrests at Caluire. Following Hardy’s acquittal in 1947, the Aubracs lent their support to a large Communist campaign to try him again. Hardy’s legacy today might best be described as a set of narratives. (After the second trial, he had, after all, taken the advice of his lawyer, Maurice Garçon, and become a successful writer whose many novels address the myriad forms of betrayal.) The Aubracs had been the first to identify Hardy as the primary suspect for the betrayal at Caluire and each narrative element of Hardy’s story would be used much later by the Aubracs’ critics to cast doubt on their story: treason to protect a lover44; dubious repeated

43

Thierry Wolton’s contention that Moulin was a Soviet agent is discussed later. Patrick Marnham offers a variant of Wolton’s thesis. He contends that Moulin worked for the Communists, who then arranged his arrest at Caluire after he strayed from party positions. Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance (New York: Random House, 2002). Jacques Baynac believes that Moulin met with the Americans days before Caluire and agreed to abandon de Gaulle and work with them, but the Germans followed him from this meeting and this led to his arrest at Caluire. Les secrets de l’Affaire Jean Moulin (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 44 Hardy claimed to have made arrangements with Barbie to protect his girlfriend Lydie Bastien and her family. Recently Pierre Péan has presented Bastien as a German agent who turned in Hardy. La diabolique de Caluire (Paris: Fayard, 1999). Henri Frenay came to think Hardy had agreed to work for the Gestapo in order to assure that the Germans would not in turn expose Bastien to the justice of the Resistance.

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escapes from captivity45; and misplaced confidence that the enemy could be outsmarted.46 The Hardy drama resurfaced with the extradition of Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie from Bolivia in 1983 to stand trial in France for crimes against humanity. Barbie’s lawyer Jacques Vergès indicated that he would defend Barbie by putting the Resistance on trial, but he ended up simply providing the materials for others to pursue this project. If the Hardy trials revealed the difficulty of confronting Resistance traumas after the war, Vergès’ evocation of the Resistance forty years later was in keeping with the emergence of a challenge to the Resistance as an element of the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome. In line with the ‘strategy of rupture’ Vergès had developed to defend FLN militants during the French-Algerian War47, he sought to reveal that it was illegitimate for the Republic to judge Barbie: the Republic was based on the Resistance myth, this myth was corrupt, and therefore the court instituted by the Republic had no right to try his client. Barbie was charged with ‘crimes against humanity’ for his role in the deportation of Jews, when in fact, Vergès contended, Barbie’s role in the events at Caluire, a ‘war crime’ whose statute of limitations had run out, was the reason that Barbie had been tracked down and extradited to stand trial in France. Why, Vergès asked, would the Republic not try Barbie on this charge? Because it was unwilling to look closely at Caluire for fear of revealing the faulty foundation—the myth of the Resistance—upon which the Republic was based. Moulin, Vergès claimed, had committed suicide by banging his head against the wall in despair over betrayal by resisters who rejected his unification of Resistance movements. 48 45

Hardy’s lawyer, Maurice Garçon, contended in 1950 that Barbie had accorded Hardy special treatment to avoid revealing his earlier errors to his superiors. 46 Henri Noguères argues persuasively that Hardy saw himself engaged in a one-on-one battle with Barbie that he thought he could win. La Verité aura le dernier mot (Paris: Seuil, 1985). 47 Jacques Vergès, De la Stratégie judiciaire (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968). 48 Moulin had been prefect of the Eure-et-Loir when the Germans invaded in June 1940. Arrested and tortured for his refusal to sign a statement blaming Senegalese soldiers in the French army for brutality toward woman and children, he had attempted to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a piece of broken glass. In addition to recycling Moulin's suicide attempt in a very different setting three years later, Vergès had the audacity to offer fulsome praise of Moulin's action in 1940 in his defense of Barbie. Vergès presented Moulin as the antithesis of the racist practices of the French colonial state, which he saw as throwing into question France’s very right to judge the Nazi Barbie. Jacques Vergès, Je Défends Barbie (Paris: Jean Picollec, 1988), 16. Barbie later compared the arrest of Moulin to that in 1957 of FLN leader Larbi Ben M’hidi, saying that Ben M’hidi had the prestige among Algerian resisters that Moulin had among French resisters. The French said Ben M’hidi had committed suicide while detained, although

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Vergès made reference to the Vichy Syndrome in his closing argument, saying the French wanted to make Barbie a scapegoat for their complicity in the crimes of Vichy, a complicity which further undercut the right of the French to try Barbie.49 By raising the issue of the Resistance in Barbie’s trial, Vergès pitted the long-dominant French memory of the Occupation, which had been cast in terms of German treatment of resisters, against the Vichy Syndrome focus on the the French state’s participation in the deportation of Jews from France. More fundamentally, Vergès cast doubt on the unity and purity of the Resistance, long the bulwark in France against memory of Vichy collaboration. The judge set aside the issue of Barbie's responsibility for events at Caluire in his first trial, reserving it for a civil suit brought by the families of two men arrested at Caluire. This inquiry began in October 1987, after Barbie had been found guilty for ‘crimes against humanity’ and sentenced to life imprisonment. Barbie died in prison in 1991, before he could be brought to trial for events at Caluire. In his postwar interrogations and articles and memoirs written in Bolivia, Barbie had held to his statement, initially made in response to questioning for Hardy’s second trial, that Hardy was his informant on Caluire. Barbie never suggested that the Aubracs had been involved. But after Barbie’s return to France to stand trial, Vergès promoted a new story. In Claude Bal's documentary about Hardy, Que la verité est amère (1984), Vergès accused Raymond Aubrac of becoming an informant after his March 1943 arrest.50 The strategy of rupture would fail if Hardy was the sole informer because he was clearly a flawed individual whose guilt would not undermine the legitimacy of the French republic. As part of the inquiry for a second trial to address Barbie’s treatment of resisters, Barbie told the examining magistrate Jacques Hamy in December 1989 that Raymond Aubrac collaborated with the Gestapo following his arrest in March 1943. After Barbie's death, Vergès produced a sixty-three page ‘testament’ signed by Barbie, but written by Vergès. The testament was based on extensive wellfootnoted historical research into inconsistencies in earlier accounts of events. The Vergès/Barbie testament echoed contemporary academic historiography by critiquing the work of Henri Noguères, author of the standard five-volume Histoire de la Résistance en France de 1940 à 1945, which relied primarily on resisters’ memories.51 In the testament, Raymond Aubrac was said to the FLN believed—correctly, French army officers later admitted—that Ben M’hidi had been tortured to death. Jacques Vergès, Le Salaud lumineux (Paris: Éditions No. 1/Michel Lafon, 1990), 216-217. 49 Vergès, Je Défends Barbie, 179-180. 50 Vergès, Le Salaud lumineux, 258-261. 51 Henri Noguères, Histoire de la Résistance en France de 1940 à 1945, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1967-1981). Vergès/Barbie critiques Noguères' work in

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have become a double agent for the Gestapo after his arrest in March 1943 in exchange for his release in May, and Lucie Aubrac to have phoned Barbie to notify him of the meeting at Caluire and to have continued to visit Gestapo officers freely after Raymond Aubrac’s arrest in June. Even the dramatic escape of Raymond Aubrac in October 1943 was presented as a Resistance effort to release a different resister which the Gestapo took advantage of to assure Raymond Aubrac's release! For many, this was Barbie's last effort to dismantle the Resistance. He had particular reason to resent Lucie Aubrac for masterminding a dramatic prison break in 1943 and Raymond Aubrac for his role in identifying Barbie in a film made in 1972 and in launching the procedure for his extradition from Bolivia. Vergès, having been found guilty of defamation against the Aubracs for his statements in Bal's 1984 film, found it safer to speak through a dead witness. The parallels between Vergès/Barbie's accusations against Raymond Aubrac in the testament and the Aubracs' and other resisters’ accusations against Hardy are clear. They turn on a set of days when accusers claim Hardy (9-12 June 1943) or Raymond Aubrac (11-14 May 1943) were in Gestapo hands, when they claimed to have been free. And Lucie Aubrac’s Ils Partiront dans l’ivresse and Hardy’s Dernier Mots, both published in 1984, are complementary memoirs and responses to Vergès/Barbie’s charges. The Vergès/Barbie testament contended that the betrayal at Caluire was overdetermined, since Hardy as well as Aubrac betrayed the meeting (although Hardy recedes to become a means to confirm information telephoned in by Lucie Aubrac).52 Both accusations rest on the assertion that Barbie turned arrested resisters into double agents: ‘As with Hardy, I held on to [Raymond] Aubrac while waiting the chance to have him “escape”’. 53 Drawing upon the widespread acceptance of Hardy's betrayal, Vergès/Barbie rewrote this narrative with Raymond Aubrac playing Hardy's role. 54 And since the Aubracs' case against Hardy had been based on circumstantial evidence, Vergès/Barbie began the case against the Aubracs in the testament by saying: ‘one must refute the presumptions on which the accusation is based. This is a question of method, to which M. Aubrac cannot object since it was the one he used against René Hardy’. 55 The Aubracs' ‘Testament’, in Gérard Chauvy, Aubrac Lyon 1943 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), 380, 385389, 402-4. 52 Vergès reports that a colleague read Ils partiront dans l’ivresse and enumerated all the bizarreries in it to him in December 1984. Beauté du crime (Paris: Plon, 1988), 19. 53 Vergès/Barbie, ‘Testament’, 382, 412. 54 Gérard Chauvy suggests that Lucie Aubrac’s story resembled that of Hardy's mistress, Lydie Bastien, who had claimed to play the role of Hardy's fiancée before the Lyon Gestapo officer with whom Lucie Aubrac, as Raymond Aubrac's putative fiancée, arranged the marriage with Raymond Aubrac. Aubrac, 178-182, 252-253. 55 Vergès/Barbie, ‘Testament’, 380.

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very insistence on Hardy's guilt was now turned against them since their denials echoed those of Hardy. 56 Hardy’s assertion that inconsistencies in his accounts were insignificant and that he was unable to remember things (‘Man is not a video camera’ 57) were the Aubracs' explanations of their innocence as well. 58 It is this very retelling of a story in which the accusers became the accused, Doppelgängeren, which gave the Aubrac affair such psychological resonance in the broken mirror of the Vichy Syndrome. *

*

*

Put oneself in the situation of a Raymond Aubrac who had really collaborated with the Germans. Obviously he would then recite the dates imperturbably in the same way for 54 years. —Serge Ravanel59

The Resistance Complex is the emotionally charged relationship of the postwar generation of Frenchmen to the resisters, who are the putative progenitors of the society in which those born after the war live. If, immediately after the war, the population of largely non-resisting Frenchmen could take shelter in the Gaullist myth of the people in resistance, succeeding generations can find the Resistance a daunting and often oppressive legacy. Some responded after 1968 by rejecting the Gaullists and the Communists, who had stymied their revolutionary quest, and claimed Marianne, la Révolution, as their own. The Republic’s claim of an origin in resistance, like the claim of an origin in revolution, always offered opponents the opportunity to establish discursive continuity with the republican political project in professing a radical break with it. French Maoists produced la Nouvelle Résistance, which soon collapsed, haunted like the original resistance by unfulfilled projects. But such Maoist flights of fancy suited few, and the resolution to the Resistance Complex for most in the 1970s and 1980s came in the form of participating in the self-proclaimed Resistance project of exposing Vichy. If youth lost hold of a revolutionary future when the trente glorieuses which would give birth to it passed, they grasped the endless future of the past embodied in the imprescriptibility of

56

Chauvy's editor, Thierry Pfister, sees Raymond Aubrac complaining of the same treatment he had long given Hardy. Libération, 11 June 1997. 57 René Hardy, Derniers mots (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 205. 58 Hardy blamed the persistent accusations made against him on splits within the Resistance and the machinations of Communists. In his last defense, Hardy directed his attack at the Aubracs, whose story he saw as having as many problematic elements as his own, and whose persistent attacks on him, he charged, must conceal secrets of their own. Ibid., esp. 562-565. 59 ‘Les Mystères Aubrac [interview of Ravanel with Rémi Kauffer]’, in Historia 604 (April 1997): 11.

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crimes against humanity, the past that will not pass evoked by Rousso and Conan.60 Investigative journalists seeking to expose the Resistance and their critics call one another ‘negationist’, the French term for Holocaust deniers, evoking a universally condemned political stance and a form of analysis and argument based on hyperattentiveness to discrepancies in accounts of the past.61 Since the mirror broke, the Vichy Syndrome has required that Vichy be kept alive by the promise of new revelations so that it can be killed again and again by new resisters. In the Resistance Complex the same dynamic is at work. No one contests the goal of the Resistance: to liberate France. The only way to contest the historic Resistance is to show that the individuals through whom the narrative of the Resistance is known and transmitted betrayed this goal. If wartime resisters can be revealed as imposters, those who reveal the imposter can take the resisters’ place.62 Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, a daily that had taken the name of Libération-Sud’s Resistance paper, gave a similar characterization of histories done by investigative journalists, at the time Gérard Chauvy published a book that questioned the Aubracs’ accounts of their Resistance activity: Once more, the “X-Files effect”, from the name of the American series based on the idea that the authorities lie about everything, that a dizzying truth hides behind the apparent certitude of institutions, is fully apparent. In attacking the Resistance, Chauvy takes the role of the iconoclast, of the resister to the legend of the Resistance. He has the good role. He proves nothing? The Aubracs' errors can be explained in many other ways than by supposed treason? No problem: Chauvy is alone against the institution. He is on the bottom, the Aubracs on top. He receives, by definition, the bonus for heterodoxy, the one the medias distribute with the most generosity. But it is not enough to be an iconoclast to be right. 63

A France defeated by German brute force nurtured narratives like that of Lucie Aubrac in which the weak master the strong by turning their qualities against them. Her story resonates with what Robert Darnton characterized as the essence of the French folk tale, in which the powerless—a French woman married to an arrested (Jewish) Resistance figure in Occupied France—uses the audacity and wit of the trickster to play upon the ‘vanity and stupidity’ of the powerful 60

Paul Thibaud, ‘Un temps de mémoire?’, Le Débat 96 (September-October 1997): 176. Thierry Wolton, L’Histoire interdite (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1998), 152, 165; Philippe Val, ‘Négationisme: après Aubrac, De Gaulle?’, Charlie Hebdo 267 (2 July 1997). 62 Resister René Fallas said those who impeded publication of Chauvy’s Aubrac would be no more successful than had those who sought to ‘étouffer les voix dérangeantes d’hommes libres’, a reference to the Resistance. ‘Préface’ to Chauvy, Aubrac, III. 63 Libération, 8 May 1997 (Laurent Joffrin). See Robert Markley, `Alien Assassinations: The X-Files and the Paranoid Structure of History’, camera obscura 40-41 (1999): 77-104. 61

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German officers. 64 Lucie Aubrac certainly understood that Resistance stories like her own had a salutary effect on the movement that transcended the benefits of the narrated actions themselves. Discussing in 1945 a number of prison escapes (but not the ones she had arranged), Lucie Aubrac concluded: In addition to the advantage to the Resistance of getting back its best, these escapes were a veritable tonic for the French spirit. They showed, in effect, that as strong as was the Vichy and German police hold over France, the Resistance, by its cohesion, its spirit of initiative and its courage, could come through, even in very difficult circumstances.65

The Aubracs' story, repeated over the BBC after their escape to London, was in turn of a nature to demoralize the German occupiers and Vichy collaborators, who listened to the BBC as well.66 But in the workings of the Resistance Complex, stories like that of the Aubracs had one meaning when performed and told by the weak, and another when told long after the war by the now powerful, honored resisters.67 For investigative journalists, the resisters’ claim to Marianne was illicit, based on stories which now trick not German officers, but the French people. If the Vichy Syndrome nurtured an obsession about impurity and contagion resulting from collaboration with Germans, the Resistance Complex gave a similar role to contact with Communists. Because, as François Furet argued, the Communist narrative is born of the project of the French Revolution68, anti-Nazi and anti-Communist narratives are different kinds of stories in France. In French anti-Nazi narratives, Nazis are alien barbarians, but they are psychologically limited and can be fooled. In French anti-Communist narratives, however, Communists in France are often duplicitous and only secondarily brutal, their machinations difficult to detect. The Resistance Complex focused on the Aubracs not solely because of their importance as historical actors per se, but because of the relationship of their life stories to the memory narratives of Nazism and Communism and the way these have played out in France.

64

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 9-72. 65 Aubrac, La Résistance, 91. 66 François Delpla, Aubrac: les faits et la calomnie (Paris: Le Temps des Cérises, 1997), 109. 67 Now that the Aubracs can be characterized as powerful, Delpla casts Chauvy as Carabosse, the troublesome fairy, for his insinuation, in the midst of public celebration of the Aubracs, that they had betrayed Moulin. Ibid., 7. 68 François Furet, Le Passé d’une illusion (Paris: Calmann-Lévy and Robert Laffont, 1995).

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Henri Frenay, founder of Combat, had contested Moulin’s authority during the war and in 1977 published L’énigme Jean Moulin, in which he charged that Moulin had been a ‘cryptocommunist’, casting doubt on Moulin’s political allegiance and moral credibility.69 Moulin’s secretary in the Resistance, Daniel Cordier, refuted Frenay’s assertions in an extraordinary, exhaustively researched biography of his patron. Resisters had long claimed that there was insufficient documentation of their activities to write the history of the Resistance without their guidance, but Cordier’s experience during the war led him to put aside resisters’ remembrances for a reliance on a variety of archives. Rather than using his recollections to guide his research as had earlier resister historians, Cordier presented his research as restoring his personal memory.70 Academic historians recognized Cordier as one of their own, both because his problematic was their own—the political divisions within the Resistance (which Moulin worked to overcome)—and because his reliance on archival sources was a major step, taken by a resister, in wresting the history of the Resistance from resisters’ control. Pursuing what he called a ‘journalism of historical investigation’, Thierry Wolton developed Frenay’s charges, identifying Moulin as a Soviet spy in Le Grand recrutement.71 Such counter-histories of Resistance narratives conceived outside the academy claim the legitimacy conferred by baptism in the purity of archives. Wolton’s interest was in intelligence work, and he contended that since spying left less clear paper traces than most other activities, the academic historian’s standard rules of evidence to support an argument did not apply. Wolton believed that, for those like himself immersed in the world of spies and their handlers, if more conclusive evidence was lacking, concordant documentary indications were sufficient to make a case. Wolton, although not (or perhaps because not) a trained academic historian, felt he was particularly gifted at interpreting such documentation. Cordier had responded with documents to Frenay; Wolton answered in turn with documents, in this case from the recently-opened Soviet archives, to argue that Moulin had been one of a number of Soviet agents in the circle around Pierre Cot, Radical minister in the Popular Front government. As François Bédarida astutely recognized, the recent availability of massive archival caches from the former Soviet Bloc has given a shot in the arm to a neopositivist faith that the archives, independent of the

69

Henri Frenay, L’énigme Jean Moulin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1977). Daniel Cordier, Jean Moulin (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1989), I: 278-303. See also Cordier’s comments in ‘Questions à l’histoire orale’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 4 (1987): 73-74. 71 Thierry Wolton, ‘La mémoire contre l’histoire’, Commentaire 62 (Summer 1993): 265-270. Thierry Wolton, Le Grand recrutement (Paris: Grasset, 1993). 70

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historian’s intervention, provide historical knowledge.72 If archives were once the purview of academic historians, journalists and nonacademic writers now often have quicker access to them. However, academic historians read these documents differently. Their ‘cult’ is not of documents per se, but of the rules of evidence guiding their interpretation, found in canonical texts like Marc Bloch’s Apologie pour l’histoire. Wolton had been a Maoist as a youth, and one interpretation of his work is that it was the bridge from French obsession with guilt over a Vichy past to a succeeding obsession with a philo-Communist past. Wolton spoke of his research in terms of breaking taboos and this recalls the French Maoists’ original project of undermining the Gaullist-Communist political order, which was built on a mythology of the Resistance, and was therefore vulnerable to breaking of taboos about the Resistance. Showing the martyr Moulin to have been a Soviet agent became a form of self-absolution for inheritors of la Nouvelle Résistance; in Vichy Syndrome style, Wolton sought to reveal previously unknown or unacknowledged collaboration, this time with the Soviets. Éric Conan and Daniel Lindenberg wrote that ‘to run down (thanks to a book by an ex-Maoist) Gaullism of the war—of which Jean Moulin is the symbol—by making it the servant of Stalinism allows them to let it fall to the level of their own youthful error’.73 François Furet and Annie Kriegel, Communists-turned-anti-Communists of the generation that was coming of age during the war, lent their support to Wolton’s project. They were deeply engaged in revealing what they saw as the particular French republican susceptibility to philo-Communism, and they had no qualms about entertaining the idea that Moulin had succumbed as well.74 Furet was writing a history of antifascism at the time, and he treated the Resistance as he treated antifascism: he saw references to the Resistance after 1945, like references to antifascism, as serving as a shield for Communists to use in deflecting condemnation of Communist states for criminal practices. Just as Furet’s initial 72

François Bédarida, ‘L’historian régisseur du temps? Savoir et responsabilité’, Revue historique 298:1 (1998): 68. 73 Éric Conan and Daniel Lindenberg, ‘Pourquoi y a-t-il une affaire Jean Moulin?’, Esprit 198 (January 1994): 8. 74 Furet explained that for twenty years he had leaned toward Frenay’s charge that Moulin was a cryptocommunist. François Furet, ‘Le secret des taupes’, Le Nouvel observateur, 1824 February 1993, 88-89; and ‘Oui, l’histoire du communisme reste à écrire’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 February-3 March 1993, 90. On Furet’s relationship to Communism, see Donald Reid, ‘François Furet and the Future of a Disillusionment’, The European Legacy 10:2 (April 2005): 193-216. For Annie Kriegel’s endorsement of Wolton, see Le Figaro Magazine, 6 February 1993. Jean-Pierre Azéma referred to Kriegel’s support for Wolton as being ‘in the genre “stal”—as we said for Stalinism when I was twenty years old’. ‘Jean Moulin et la Résistance: essai historiographique’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 27 (June 1994): 15.

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project was to declare the French Revolution over, he now sought to declare the Resistance—‘the last historical incarnation, in a minor key, of the revolutionary nation’75—over as well, and did so by associating himself with new resisters in journalistic garb. Stéphane Courtois, another Maoist turned anti-Communist, and a leading historian of French Communism, agreed with Wolton that in the history of intelligence work different rules of proving arguments applied, and he saw Le Grand recrutement as the subject of ‘historically correct’ attacks.76 But Furet, Kriegel and Courtois found few allies among academic historians of the Resistance, who, Wolton complained, ‘brandished la table des lois de l’histoire, of their law, forbidding debate’.77 *

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In fifty years, [some] will take the resistance for a subject, or target, of their academic exercises…. Alas, it is quite likely that, fifty years having passed, the Historians will say something quite different than what we would like. They will say, the Historians, what they will be able to say, being men of the year 2000, living in the climate of the year 2000, impregnated with the spirit and the needs and the necessities of the year 2000. Yet another reason for us to gather, the men of 1950… in all honesty, our own version of events that, certainly, they will interpret differently than us. They will not be able to not interpret them differently than us, I understand—but also than the Historians of the year 2050, who will follow. We can’t say that they are right, and that we are wrong. At least our version of events has its living proof. And it is countersigned by thousands of sacrifices. In the double meaning of the word—it had its Martyrs. —Lucien Febvre78

75

François Furet, ‘La France Unie…’, in François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon, La République du centre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988), 55. 76 Stéphane Courtois, ‘Cot souhaite que les dirigeants de l’URSS sachent qu’il est prêt à remplir n’importe quelle mission’. Remarques sur un rapport (Paris: S. Courtois, 1995), 5. Véronique Sales, ‘Stéphane Courtois: Rebelle professionnel’, L’Histoire 227 (December 1998): 33. Courtois called Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s careful dissection of Wolton’s work, Le Trait empoisonné. Réflexions sur l’affaire Jean Moulin (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), a ‘spiteful [méchant] pamphlet’. ‘Archives du communisme: mort d’une mémoire, naissance d’une histoire’, Le Débat 77 (November-December 1993): 155. However, in a more specialized setting, Courtois looked closely at Wolton’s text and could offer it at best tepid support. ‘Jean Moulin et les Communistes’, L’Histoire 160 (May 1993): 11-15. 77 Wolton, L’Histoire interdite, 138. 78 Lucien Febvre, ‘Avant-Propos’ to Henri Michel and Boris Mirkine-Guetzévitch, Les Idées politiques et sociales de la Résistance (Paris: P.U.F., 1954), ix, xi.

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Since the mirror of Gaullist memory of the Occupation broke in the early 1970s, academic historians of the Resistance have faced challenges from resisters as well as from investigative journalists engaged in historical projects. Resisters who embraced important elements of the representation of the Resistance as a fundamentally unified movement, the vanguard of a people in resistance, rejected the critique of the Gaullist vision of Resistance that accompanied the revelation of an Occupied France which this vision of the Resistance had obscured. Resisters have long contended that their accounts are the fundamental basis of any history of the Resistance. As clandestine movements would leave few written records, participants' memories must be the primary source of information on the internal Resistance, and resisters would therefore serve as guardians of the truth about the Resistance. More fundamental, if often unexpressed, is the sense that the Resistance was a radically different experience of a sort inaccessible to nonresisters without resisters to serve as guides. After the war, historians in the Comité de l’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (CHDGM), operating under the aegis of the president of the council of ministers, were given the role of documenting and presenting the Resistance. Resisters cooperated with what many came to see as a guardian of the history of the Resistance. Lucie Aubrac sat with other prominent resisters on the board of the CHDGM. She had overseen the liquidation of Libération-Sud. The CHDGM envisaged her writing the history of the movement, believing that resisters would share their memories and documents with her, a fellow resister, more readily than with an historian without her experience. However, Lucie Aubrac never wrote this history.79 In 1979 the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP) took over the mission of the CHDGM, but it operates independently of the government. The IHTP understands itself as employing an historical methodology with a chronological distance (compounded in most cases by a generational distance between resisters and historians) that allows academic historians to use resisters as sources, but to write a history independent of the agendas pursued by historical actors of the recent past, as well as those inherent in the Vichy Syndrome, which was first identified and analyzed by Rousso, current director of the IHTP. Rousso observed critically of historical work on the Resistance that ‘there are few historical fields in which the majority of those writing the historical accounts are those who were former protagonists in the events and not professional historians’. 80 Conan and Lindenberg argue that there is no longer any block on serious scholarship about Vichy; the problem today is a hesitation to undertake such studies of the Resistance. 81 Resisters continue to cooperate with historians, 79

Laurent Douzou, La Résistance française: une histoire périlleuse (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 165, 167, 173-174. 80 Conan and Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 158 81 Conan and Lindenberg, ‘Pourquoi y a-t-il une affaire Jean Moulin?’, 10.

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but many have come to view the historians’ enterprise with suspicion. Pierre Laborie refers to historians as the trouble-mémoire of the Resistance; they are kept ‘under surveillance’ by the resisters whom they study.82 Resister and academic historian François Bédarida sees historians of the Resistance engaged in a ‘tenacious and ungrateful combat... against the deformations and mythmaking’ of resisters.83 And, in turn, historians’ preference for written records over resisters’ accounts can reintroduce the resisters’ beleaguered wartime status into the debate. For Raymond Aubrac Under the Occupation, there existed a permanent struggle between the resisters and the forces of repression. It was an unequal struggle from many points of view. One of them is worth underlining: whether the Gestapo or the French police, these services possessed the dossiers, the archives. They constituted their history. They had all of this in hand while the resisters had only their memory. They are reduced to their memories, subject to variations, sometimes to errors. 84

If resisters embody the legacy of the Resistance to be remembered and pursued, investigative journalists are primary vectors of the concern with complicity and duplicity in occupied France. Speaking obsessively of secrecy and betrayal, and of the revelatory power of archives, they claim to uncover the history ignored or repressed by academic historians, guardians by dint of their position in the state cultural apparatus of an ‘official history’ said to persist long after the dissolution of the CHDGM. For Wolton the IHTP is devoted to maintaining this ‘official history’, and academic historians are ‘functionaries’ out to protect guild prerogatives.85 Investigative journalists claim that academic historians fail to question resisters’ accounts, and academic historians are sensitive to this charge. Despite the mutual hostility of investigative journalists and academic historians, they share in a project they present in the language of anticlerical icon-breaking. Conan and Rousso refer to ‘memory of the Resistance’ as ‘a civic religion’.86 Thierry Pfister, spokesman for the investigative journalists, believed that since the Aubracs had promoted themselves ‘endlessly’ as a ‘show-window of the 82

Pierre Laborie, ‘Histoire et résistance: des historiens trouble-mémoire’, in IHTP, Ecrire l’histoire du temps présent (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1993), 133-141. What became a burden for a later generation of historians had been a responsibility for resisters-turnedhistorians. Henri Noguères, author of the standard five-volume history of the Resistance, based on resisters’ accounts, explained in 1972: ‘We believe we have duties, as former resisters trying their best to write the History of the Resistance under the control of the survivors, more than as historians’. La Verité, 18. 83 Libération, 12-13 July 1987 (François Bédarida). 84 Le Monde, 4 April 1997, VI. 85 Wolton, L’Histoire interdite, 23, 137. 86 Conan and Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 158.

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Resistance’, it was his responsibility as ‘citizen’ of the very republic the Resistance had helped secure to promote study of these ‘"lay saints”... before whom all must go genuflect’.87 For the historian Bédarida there are ‘no taboos’ in history, no sacred ‘untouchable’ personages. 88 And, though skeptical of accounts of the Aubracs’ doubledealing during the war, academic historian Olivier Wieviorka credits their resonance to the Aubracs’ moral failings long after the war: ‘No one today could suspect the Aubracs, if they hadn't claimed in their lifetimes to reach sainthood in posing as the model resistant, model militant, model teacher, model couple’. 89 That said, the missions of investigative journalists and academic historians are fundamentally different. Investigative journalists are rebels who assume the role of resister for themselves: they keep the resisters’ Resistance alive in order to resist it. Academic historians have a different goal. They do not seek the status of resisters, but would like to take from resisters what keeps resisters’ Resistance alive: their dominant role in perpetuation of the narrative of the Resistance. Like all contemporary scholars, they deny that there are taboos, but in wresting memory from the community of resisters, they seek to assure order among themselves by establishing and enforcing rules of historical method for all, including investigative journalists. Nothing irritates investigative journalists more than when the devoir de mémoire (or d’histoire) they see themselves pursuing is treated as les devoirs (homework) and graded accordingly.90 The commission of prominent historians asked by the Cot family to examine Wolton’s charges that Pierre Cot was a Soviet agent rejected his allegations.91 The IHTP published the proceedings of a colloquium it held on the fiftieth anniversary of Moulin’s arrest that refuted, in Wolton’s absence, his charges against Moulin.92 Such initiatives only confirmed outsiders to the academy like Wolton in their belief that academic historians sought to protect an ‘official history’ centered on the Resistance myth. 87

Libération, 11 June 1997 (Thierry Pfister). Libération, 9 July 1997, iv (François Bédarida). 89 Libération, April 8, 1997 (Olivier Wieviorka). 90 Antoine Prost made refutation of Wolton an example in his widely-used student text, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 60-61. For Delpla, Chauvy is like a lycéen found doing something other than history during history class. Aubrac, 40. 91 See Serge Bernstein, Robert Frank, Sabine Jansen, and Nicolas Werth, Rapport de la Commission d’historiens constituée pour examiner la nature des relations de Pierre Cot avec les autorités soviétiques (Paris: B & Cie., 1995) and Courtois’ rebuttal, ‘Cot souhaite’, 73; ‘Les crimes de Staline’ [interview with Courtois], Le Monde, 26 December 1995. 92 Jean-Pierre Azéma, François Bédarida and Robert Frank, eds., ‘Jean Moulin et la Résistance en 1943’, Cahiers de L’IHTP 27 (June 1994). 88

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To support their position with respect to investigative journalists driven by the Resistance Complex, academic historians must show that they can stand up to resisters. Not surprisingly, historians who confront what they see as resisters’ efforts to control the historical narrative of the Resistance find resisters who write in the mode of academic history particularly appealing. These include academic historians who were in the Resistance (Bédarida), resisters who champion academic history (Cordier) 93 and academic historians who have paid a price for their resistance elsewhere (Karel Bartosek). Resisters like Lucie Aubrac never saw themselves writing primarily for academic historians. She published Ils partiront dans l’ivresse in 1984 as a defense against Vergès’ charges and as testimony for a population that came of age long after the war. Lucie Aubrac saw her account as part of a continuing struggle against the forces she had fought during the war, personified now by Vergès; victory in this political struggle required future generations to join her in resisting. Ils partiront dans l’ivresse was clearly born of her experience of going to talk at schools. ‘I did not write a history book with a big H, but a book in which I told of a pregnancy and a life’.94 She saw that students were not interested in connaissances proprement historiques, and with students of all levels, she ‘acted at first as the storyteller in the chanson de geste’. In a challenge to investigative journalists and academic historians, mired in their archives, she said that they cannot imagine the ‘richness’ of resister accounts lycée students tape-record and the personal papers they harvest from resisters. For resisters will tell inquiring students, the future of the Resistance project, things they would never tell historians or journalists.95 The iconic figure in these discussions is Marc Bloch—like the agrégée d’histoire Lucie Aubrac, a resister who possessed ‘the double stature of historian and of witness’.96 Academic historians chastise Lucie Aubrac for failing to adhere to the academic training she had received before the war at Bloch’s Université de Strasbourg, and like to imagine how Bloch, had he not been executed by the Germans, would have written the history of the Resistance.97 Historians cite 93

Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, ‘La “révolution” Cordier’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma, ed., Jean Moulin face à l’Histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 347-361. 94 Libération, 9 July 1997, xvi. 95 Lucie Aubrac, ‘La Vocation pédagogique du témoignage’, in Serge Wolikow, ed., Les Images collectives de la Résistance (Dijon: EUD, 1996), 73-74. 96 Philippe Joutard in ‘Table ronde’, in François Marcot, ed., La Résistance et les Français: lutte armée et maquis (Besançon: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, 1996), 484. 97 Lucie Aubrac, too, aligns her way of doing history with that of Marc Bloch, saying, for instance, ‘I think, like Marc Bloch, that the present sheds light on the past, just as the past allows comprehension of the present’. Cette exigeante liberté, 78.

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Bloch’s dictum from Apologie pour l’histoire that ‘the good historian resembles the ogre of legend. There where he smells human flesh, he knows that there is his prey’.98 However, resister and prominent historian of the ancient world, Jean-Pierre Vernant, responded that when Serge Ravenel and other resisters say that they do not find themselves in historians’ accounts, they are saying, ‘But then, and the “human flesh”? You don’t have an appetite for that?’99 For there is an ambiguity in Bloch’s bon mot. In Bloch’s Apologie, historians seek the human, but to succeed they must play the ogre, denying men and women the human attributes they share with them, in order to satisfy their appetites. Debates about Moulin’s relation to the Communists are the context in which accusations against the Aubracs were made in the 1990s. Rigor with the Aubracs was a complement to academic historians’ defense of Moulin against Wolton’s charges, and crucial to their establishment of distance from investigative journalists, while shielding themselves from the accusation that they were maintaining the ‘official history’ of the Resistance. The Aubracs were fellow travelers with close personal ties to a number of Communists. In 1948 Raymond Aubrac launched the Bureau d'études et de recherches pour l'industrie moderne (BERIM) with three Communist and fellow traveler colleagues, and co-directed it for a decade. BERIM was an engineering and marketing firm that soon expanded operations to Communist nations in Central Europe. The Aubracs lived for several years in Prague, a center of postwar European Communism. In the fall of 1996, the Prague Spring and Charter 77 Czech historian Karel Bartosek, who had gone into exile in France, published Les Aveux des archives: Prague-Paris-Prague 1948-1968, a study of the relations of the French and Czechoslovak Communist parties. 100 A member of the party for fifteen years, Bartosek experienced his ‘mourning of the Communist faith’ even as he explored its sins.101 Les Aveux des archives was widely debated for Bartosek’s critical account of Artur London, deported French resister and vice-minister for Foreign Affairs in Czechoslovakia before being arrested in 1951 as part of the Slansky 98

See, e.g., Marc Lazar, ‘La chair humaine de l’histoire’, Le Monde, 21 November 1996. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘La mémoire et les historiens’, in Jean-Marie Guillon and Pierre Laborie, eds., Mémoire et histoire: la Résistance (Toulouse: Privat, 1995), 344. See Serge Ravanel, ‘Réflexions sur la relation entre historiens et acteurs de la résistance intérieure’, in ibid., 313-319. 100 Karel Bartosek, Les Aveux des archives. Prague-Paris-Prague, 1948-1968 (Paris: Seuil, 1996). On the controversies elicited by Les Aveux des archives, see Marc Lazar and Daniel Lindenberg, ‘Ce qu'avouent les archives du communisme’, Esprit 228 (January 1997): 173183; and Pierre Grémion, ‘Aperçus du communisme franco-tchécoslovaque’, Esprit 230-231 (March-April 1997): 92-108. 101 Karel Bartosek, ‘Les Supplices de la mémoire’, Politis, 3 July 1997, 8. 99

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Affair. Bartosek examines London’s behavior while imprisoned and his memoir of his arrest and trial, L'Aveu.102 He largely dismissed the account of London’s career and trial that London had written in secret while imprisoned and passed on to his wife—the basis of L’Aveu—in favor of a report London later wrote in an effort to achieve rehabilitation. L'Aveu was a crucial and revered text for the French left because it showed how a Communist who had suffered from Stalinist brutality could remain loyal to the Communist project, and in so doing purge Communism of Stalinism, preserving the revolutionary ideal for readers.103 Bartosek rejected L’Aveu as a book written in 1968 as the behest of the PCF to shelter the party by blaming abuses on Stalinists past.104 Bartosek also cast suspicions on London’s friend, Raymond Aubrac, for his activities in BERIM, through which Bartosek believes funds were channeled to the PCF. (Aubrac contends that BERIM employees, including himself, made personal donations to the party, but BERIM did not, to his knowledge, transfer funds to the PCF.) Although the documents Bartosek presents do not show that Aubrac was knowingly involved in the transfer of funds to the PCF through BERIM, he faults Aubrac for not admitting his collaboration with the foreign forces occupying his nation, Czechoslovakia. In response to the implications and extrapolations Bartosek drew from Aubrac's role in BERIM's activities, Raymond Aubrac set forth what he saw as the difference between an historian and an examining magistrate.105 Although Bartosek made a scathing critique of Wolton’s use of sources,106 the metaphor of archives making confessions was in line with Wolton’s methodology. After Bartosek was named a researcher at the IHTP, Raymond Aubrac broke with the institute, with which he had previously worked on

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Bartosek criticized London for omitting from later accounts of his life his work with the Soviet secret services in Spain during the Civil War, but Bartosek performed a similar editing of his own life in Les Aveux des archives. Bartosek had co-authored a text, published in 1951, which denounced those condemned in the Slansky trial and explained that the American army had come to Germany in 1945 not to liberate the German people, but to save what remained of the German war machine. Andrej Stankovic, ‘Karel Bartosek, les Américains et le complot sionist de 1952 (extraits du livre de Karel Bartosek et Karel Pichlik)’, Les Cahiers du mouvement ouvrier 2 (June 1998): 118-120. See Muriel Blaive’s sensitive discussion of Bartosek in Un Rendez-vous manqué de l’histoire: l’année 1956 en Tchécoslovaquie (Paris: Editions Complexe, 2005). 103 Le Monde, 26 December 1995 (Courtois); Gilles Perrault, ‘Communisme, les falsifications d’un “livre noir”’, Le Monde diplomatique, December 1997, 23. 104 Artur London, Aux sources de l’aveu (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) casts doubt on Bartosek’s argument that London wrote L’Aveu in 1968 at the request of the PCF. 105 Bartosek, Les Aveux des archives, 119. 106 Ibid., 31-32.

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the history of the Resistance.107 In November 1996, after scathing criticism of Les Aveux des archives appeared in Le Monde, nineteen historians published a letter of support for Bartosek in Le Monde: ‘there are no taboo subjects’, they said, for historians who follow the rules of historical method.108 This was the context in which Gérard Chauvy published Aubrac Lyon 1943 in 1997. *

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As ‘historians of the present time’, they had the monopoly on the true reconstruction of events. Domaine réservé. As soon as the Aubracs ventured out, under the pretext of witnessing, in the telling of facts, they trampled the flowerbeds [piétinaient les plates-bandes] of historical knowledge. They took the bread from the historians’ mouths. It was necessary to use all means to put them back in their place; one does not mix the rags with the towels.—Jean-Pierre Vernant109

Investigative journalist Gérard Chauvy is what academic historian JeanPierre Azéma has referred to as an historiant, borrowing from Roland Barthes’ differentiation between an écrivain and an écrivant: historiants are ‘those who are not professional historians, but who support their work with archives, in the largest sense of the term’.110 In the style of other journalists approaching historical subjects, like Wolton, Chauvy saw history as the presentation of documents rather than the systematic presentation of hypotheses, evidence, and the evaluation of arguments. In a favorable portrait, Le Figaro explained that Chauvy ‘wants to be the entomologist of the Occupation period’. 111 Chauvy’s Aubrac Lyon 1943 included the first published version of Vergès/Barbie's testament and the book is an elaboration of that document, itself the product of Vergès' historical research. Vergès had been preparing a degree in history when he interrupted his studies to go to Prague in the early 1950s to work in the international Communist anticolonial student movement, saying he liked historical research but not teaching112—the opposite of Lucie Aubrac. And the testament is the inverse of her Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, a memoir with no reference to archives. By endowing the Gestapo with extraordinary prescience and 107

Libération, 10 July 1997 (Raymond Aubrac). ‘Pour Karel Bartosek’, Le Monde, 24-25 November 1996. See also Bédarida's letter of support for Bartosek in Le Monde, 17-18 November 1996. 109 Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Traversée des frontières (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 57. 110 Jean-Pierre Azéma, ‘Vichy et la mémoire savante: quarante-cinq ans d’historiographie’, in Jean-Pierre Azéma and François Bédarida, eds., Le Régime de Vichy et les Français (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 23. 111 Le Figaro, 3 April 1997 (François Luizet). 112 Vergès, Le Salaud lumineux, 140. 108

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control over events, Chauvy turned the Dartonesque element of Lucie Aubrac’s account on its head, ignoring the context of numerous tales of extraordinary escapes by prisoners of war and resisters.113 Chauvy requires the Vergès/Barbie testament because only it provides him with the narrative plot line of accusations against the Aubracs that is the raison d'être of his book (even if he contests some elements of Vergès/Barbie’s account). Lucie Aubrac had told of saving her husband in 1943. For Chauvy, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse becomes another effort to save him, this time against charges that Raymond Aubrac had been freed in exchange for supplying information to Barbie. Although Chauvy did not subject the testament's relation to Barbie's earlier (and quite different) versions of events to questioning, he analyzed punctiliously each account Raymond Aubrac and Lucie Aubrac had offered of the events of 1943 during the war, in the postwar trials of Hardy, and in response to the extradition and trial of Barbie. However, Chauvy refrained from interviewing the Aubracs and other resisters like Serge Ravanel and Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont (arrested with Raymond Aubrac in March 1943). If he presents no ‘smoking gun’, he does show many instances in which dates or memories of who was present at a meeting or what was said in an interrogation differ in the Aubracs’ testimony over a half-century. The most serious questions concern if and when Barbie learned that his prisoner was Aubrac, a leader of the Armée secrète. Having found these inconsistencies, Chauvy concluded that, although he could find no proof for Barbie's charges, the Aubracs had dissembled and their accounts of dealings with the Gestapo are consequently to be doubted. Unable to show evidence of particular wrongdoings on the part of the Aubracs, he seeks to portray them as personalities who cannot be trusted. In so doing, Chauvy had, he believed, ‘touched a taboo, violated a sanctuary’.114 He presented himself as defending the truth of the Resistance against resisters, in line with fellow investigative journalists’ effort to take on the legacy of the Resistance for themselves, wresting it from resisters and too complacent academic historians. The first response to Aubrac Lyon 1943 came in April 1997 in a public letter signed by nineteen prominent resisters, including Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, who tied Chauvy’s aspersions about the Aubracs to recent attacks on other resisters, Jean Moulin and Artur London. A look at the signers underscores that whatever the divisions among movements during the war underscored by contemporary historians, the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome has created and enforced a solidarity among surviving resisters from across the political spectrum. If, after the war, they had promoted 113

See, for example, Jean-Paul Vernant’s account of Victor Leduc’s escape in January 1944, involving a false telegram and Leduc’s playing an aphasiac. Entre mythe et politique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 567-568. 114 Libération, 6 February 1998 (François Devinat).

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the Gaullist idea of a people in resistance that had given meaning to their sacrifices, now, generations later, they had come to feel the isolated embattled minority that the Vichy Syndrome account portrayed them as having been during the war. The letter of support was an affirmation of the need to pursue resistance today. The Resistance, whatever its fissures and human weaknesses, is the very base on which we rebuilt the democratic and republican France that we love and that we want to defend. But we witness today, in a society in crisis, a putting into question of these values, which accompanies a fascist thrust that, to legitimate itself, needs to efface the honor of the Resistance in order to make the dishonor 115 of Vichy be forgotten. This we cannot accept either.

The Resistance was an affair of honor. Hardy and Maurice Papon, whose accounts of their wartime activities had been challenged, chose to convoke juries of honor, composed of resisters, the only individuals with the experience of the Resistance necessary to judge them. But the Aubracs looked to historians to play this role. In October 1991, Raymond Aubrac had called unsuccessfully for a roundtable of historians to lay out (mettre à plat) the events at Caluire in response to the Vergès/Barbie testament.116 After publication of Chauvy’s book, he again asked for a roundtable, modeled on the one organized by the IHTP that had condemned Wolton’s characterization of Jean Moulin: it had made it, in the words of Conan and Rousso, the ‘Wolton Affair’, not the ‘Moulin Affair’.117 The Aubracs hoped that the Aubrac Affair would become the Chauvy Affair. In his introduction to the publication of the 1994 roundtable, the then IHTP director Robert Frank had said that ‘it was inconceivable to leave without response the accusations of Klaus Barbie and his lawyer against Raymond Aubrac’ (although they had).118 Among those invited to the Aubrac roundtable three years later were several historians who had offered devastating critiques of Wolton’s work in the IHTP colloquium, including Rousso, as well as Azéma and

115

This letter is reprinted in Delpla, Aubrac, 162-163. See also Anise Postel-Vinay, ‘Une nouvelle méthode historique: l’insinuation sans preuve’, Voix et Visages 256 (JulyOctober 1997): 1-3; and the interventions of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Stéphane Hessel in Le Nouvel observateur, 10-16 April 1997, 20. 116 Le Monde, 10 October 1991. 117 Conan and Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 163; Azéma, ‘Jean Moulin et la Résistance’, 16. 118 Robert Frank, ‘Introduction’, to Azéma, Bédarida and Frank, eds., ‘Jean Moulin et la Résistance en 1943’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 27 (June 1994): 6.

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Bédarida, who saw Wolton’s book and the support it had received as elements of a politically-inspired attack on the Resistance.119 But it was Cordier’s idea of a roundtable about the Aubracs, not the Aubracs’ idea of a roundtable about Chauvy’s work, that triumphed. While rejecting the idea that the Aubracs had been Barbie's source of information on Caluire, and taking Chauvy to task for his failure to subject the ‘incredible lies’ in Barbie's changing accounts of events since the war to the scrupulous attention he devoted to the Aubracs' retellings of events, Cordier concluded that ‘the succession of versions given by [the Aubracs] about the events which preceded and followed Caluire exceeds the legitimate failures of memory which one ascertains in all resisters, I would say in all historical actors.... As comrade of the Aubracs, I would like for them to explain, not before a court certainly, but before a commission of historians’. ‘I do not think’, he said, ‘that the Aubracs have, for the year 1943, told all the truth and they must render their accounts’. Troubled by the inconsistencies in the Aubracs' accounts of events, Cordier refused to sign the resisters’ petition of support. He believed that the Aubracs, by having gone public with their story, had taken on the responsibility of answering historians' questions: As long as the Aubracs remained in anonymity, they did not have to account to anyone, except to their comrades and to their peers. But, from the moment they lent themselves to multiple media operations, whether they like it or not, they became a myth or a legend. Whether they created or submitted reluctantly to this drift, they claim in effect to incarnate the spirit and the meaning of our actions. With this change in their status, they lost the advantages of an anonymous resister and, because of this plethora of honors, owe accounts to all French. 120

Libération agreed to host the roundtable in May 1997 and published the proceedings in a supplement to the paper in July 1997. The Aubracs nixed the plan to interrogate them separately.121 They were joined by Cordier; Bédarida, the former director of the IHTP; the current director Rousso; Azéma, prominent historian of the Resistance who was working on a biography of Moulin; Dominique Veillon, researcher at the IHTP and author of several important works on the Occupation; Maurice Agulhon, resister, professor at the Collège de France, and historian of modern France; Laurent Douzou, author of La Désobéissance, 119

Azéma, ‘Jean Moulin et la Résistance’, 9-17; François Bédarida, ‘L’histoire de la Résistance et l’“affaire Jean Moulin”’, Cahiers de l’IHTP 27 (June 1994): 155-164. 120 Libération, 8 April 1997 (interview with Cordier by Oliver Wieviorka). Vernant places each individual’s interactions with the Aubracs at the roundtable in the context of their interests and identities. He suggests that Cordier felt that the public renown of the Aubracs cast a shadow on his patron Moulin. Vernant believes that this helps explain Cordier’s ‘surliness’ toward the Aubracs. La Traversée, 56. 121 Libération, 10 July 1997 (Lucie Aubrac).

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histoire du mouvement Libération-Sud122 (and for whom Agulhon had served as thesis advisor); and Jean-Pierre Vernant, a leader of Libération-Sud in Toulouse, historian of the ancient world, and honorary professor at the Collège de France. Chauvy was not invited to the roundtable nor even informed of it.123 Participants brought their own histories to the roundtable. Azéma, Bédarida and Rousso had signed the letter of support for Bartosek six months earlier. Rousso would be asked why he participated in the Aubrac roundtable, but declined to testify at the trial of Maurice Papon later that year. His response that Raymond Aubrac had asked for the roundtable124 did not take into account that the Papon defense had asked Rousso for his testimony in a trial Papon did not want, as Aubrac had asked for the roundtable after publication of a book he did not want. Azéma too had staked out his position in the controversy. In June 1997 he published a critical review of Aubrac Lyon 1943 in which he dismissed Chauvy’s suggestion that Aubrac had informed Barbie of the meeting at Caluire. But Azéma expressed disbelief that the Germans would have believed Lucie Aubrac's marriage story and questioned why Raymond Aubrac was held in Lyon, rather then sent to Paris after his arrest at Caluire, and why he was questioned there only a half-dozen times in four months: ‘Evidently, a succession of instances of unusual good luck is not impossible and is something of which the history of the Resistance is not totally exempt. But one is more inclined to think that there remain a certain number of shadowy areas, that, for his own reasons, Raymond Aubrac does not intend to clear up’.125 Azéma, Bédarida, Cordier, and Rousso had not used the Aubracs as important sources in their research. This was not the case for Maurice Agulhon, who had made extensive use of interviews with Raymond Aubrac in writing C.R.S. à Marseille.126 Interviews with Raymond Aubrac and Lucie Aubrac had been crucial for Laurent Douzou in researching La Désobéissance.127 Daniel Cordier believed that ‘historians of the Resistance have been too credulous with the

122

Laurent Douzou, La Désobéissance, histoire du mouvement Libération-Sud (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1995). 123 Libération, 24 July 1997 (Gérard Chauvy). 124 Le Monde, 16 October 1997 (Nicolas Weill). 125 Jean-Pierre Azéma, ‘Il n'y a pas d'affaire Aubrac’, L'Histoire 211 (June 1997): 85. 126 Maurice Agulhon, C. R. S. à Marseille, "la police au service du peuple", 1944-1947 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971). 127 Douzou explained at the beginning of the roundtable: ‘What I have in mind is not to pose questions to Raymond and to Lucie Aubrac. This would be on my part a confusing naïveté, after having worked for so long on these dossiers and been alongside these two resisters, to discover today that there are questions which I should have asked and that I had forgotten to ask’. Libération, 9 July 1997, vi.

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“great” witnesses’.128 Resisters’ credibility and historians credulity were the core issues of the roundtable discussion. Lucie Aubrac had presented the story of being a wronged woman to a Gestapo officer and of having taken advantage of his gullibility to arrange her husband’s escape. At the Libération roundtable Lucie Aubrac again asked that a wrong be righted, but to an audience who had heard her story and was intent on not allowing the Aubracs opportunities for evasion. Historians at the roundtable dismissed analysis of Chauvy’s work in favor of revealing the danger of depending on resisters’ memories for a history of the Resistance.129 Without a charge to judge, like assessment of Chauvy’s book, the discussion with the Aubracs was more like the questioning which precedes the filing of charges, not the elicitation of testimony practiced by oral historians.130 Although no historian presented a clear hypothesis of treasonous actions by the Aubracs, several of the historians present sought to show that dependence on resisters’ testimony has dire consequences. They did so by charging Lucie Aubrac with claiming to remember too much and Raymond Aubrac with claiming to remember too little. Bédarida contended that historians must protect the Resistance from resisters. Historians can deal with the inaccuracies and stories told by resisters, but the public cannot; Lucie Aubrac may have thought she was sustaining the history of the Resistance in Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, but she was undercutting it.131 The historians pursued a variant of Chauvy’s strategy of doubt to show the unreliability of resisters’ accounts of their actions by pointing out the incompatibility of accounts given by the Aubracs over the fifty years since the war. Cordier responded to Raymond Aubrac’s different versions of when the Germans learned of his identity: ‘I know that you are not hiding a treason, but I ask myself what else you are trying to hide. For it seems to me that behind this drift, there is something unavowable’.132 Resisters’ memories betray them, even if the acts misremembered were not of betrayal. Cordier’s suggestion that the Gestapo may have identified and deported Raymond Aubrac’s parents as a result of Lucie Aubrac’s visits to the Gestapo was the only specific outcome of her actions suggested at the roundtable. The 128

Daniel Cordier, ‘L’Historien face à la Résistance’, in Azéma,, ed., Jean Moulin, 16. After the roundtable, Cordier contended that historians who had cited the Aubracs as evidence now defended them out of a guilty professional conscience. Libération, 11 July 1997 (Daniel Cordier). 129 The historians’ lack of attention to Chauvy’s work spurred Wolton to refer to them as ‘recuperating Chauvy’, and ‘acting as phagocytes’: those who ingest and destroy waste and harmful material. L’Histoire interdite, 153. 130 Lucien Karpik, ‘La machine infernale’, Justices 2 (2000): 177-190. 131 Libération, 9 July 1997, xxii (François Bédarida). 132 Libération, 9 July 1997, xviii (Daniel Cordier).

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hypothesis was shocking. Cordier was acting as he felt Lucie Aubrac had acted, telling a story within the confines of the known evidence. He retold her story in such a way as to assure she was punished by the consequences. Only the fact that it was posed by Cordier and not an historian, argued Rousso, made it acceptable: ‘it was a resister, that is to say a peer, an equal of the Aubrac couple, who put this question on the floor and not an historian’. (This did not stop participants from seeking to remove the passage from the published transcript of the roundtable, a step Lucie Aubrac refused to sanction.133) The hypothesis was quite revealing about the nature of questioning at the roundtable. From Chauvy’s narrative of the Aubracs’ conscious betrayal of Moulin, the move had been made to an unintended betrayal resulting from Lucie Aubrac’s actions during the war, a way of retelling her story in terms of what she could not have known. For Cordier, partisan of a document-based history of the Resistance, actors’ recollections are most valuable when speakers reveal what they do not know they are saying.134 Resisters long claimed that the nature of the Resistance precluded the keeping of detailed records and that therefore their accounts must be the basis of a history of the Resistance. In recent years, historians have drawn on a variety of archives to challenge this belief, but resisters still see their knowledge of one another (rather than of details of events) as necessary to understand and interpret the Resistance. Resistance organisations like Libération-Sud were born of individuals’ knowledge and assessments of personalities and the very centrality of such assessments is hard for the historian working solely from written documentation to grasp and convey. The prevalence of the metaphor of ‘seduction’ in accounts of d’Astier de la Vigerie’s recruitment of Libération-Sud (and of Lucie Aubrac’s power) presents difficulties for historians. Similarly, the Aubracs’ comrade Pascal Copeau said of resisters that ‘their principal arm is something approaching the bluff’, not just with the enemy but between Resistance groups and individuals within them.135 Jean-Pierre Vernant had been an activist with Lucie Aubrac in the Quartier Latin in the 1930s, and explained that knowing her then helped him evaluate her account. He could ask Cordier whether he would have defended Moulin so strongly and convincingly if he had not drawn on his experience with Moulin for an understanding of how he thought and acted. Vernant suggested that 133

Rousso, La Hantise, 134. It would seem that such editing of the transcript, however acceptable if it was a synthesis of historical research, would be untrue to the roundtable as an historical event. 134 Karpik says Cordier told him that he believed the ‘unavowable secret’ Raymond Aubrac was hiding concerned the arrest of his family. ‘La machine internale’, 183n6. 135 Pascal Copeau, ‘Préface’ to Fernand Rude, Libération de Lyon et de sa région (Paris: Hachette, 1974).

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he brought to discussion of the Aubracs the kind of unacknowledged sentiments that Cordier brought to his defense of Moulin.136 Vernant saw his familiarity with Lucie Aubrac and with ‘the situation outside the norm’ of the Resistance as opening up interpretative possibilities that later researchers could miss. Commenting on her account of her visit to the Gestapo, Vernant explained: Already in the Latin Quarter, each time a completely crazy fling came up, Lucie was off. [Her visit to the Gestapo] succeeded precisely because of this absolutely irrational side. At the Gestapo, the Germans as good rationalists cannot for a second believe that a lycée professor is going to make up such a story: to find a false identification card, to disguise herself…. They are going to express all sorts of hypotheses, but not an escape. The historians acted the same way at the Libération roundtable. [They could not believe she would just enter the Gestapo offices.] And there is the way of making an entry. Lucie can do it, she plays somebody, she enters…. In this situation outside the norm, resisters find themselves in a position analogous to rebels [réfractaires] or gangsters. They form a society apart. This works or it does not work, some fall, others do not. Chance, the luck of the draw, coincidences come into play. And to pick to pieces the statements of Pierre, Paul or Jules in the name of a certain rationality, that of daily life and of a normal society, puts one outside this reality [fait passer 137 à côté de la réalité].

Vernant concluded that historians had no right to constitute a tribunal, treating historical actors as suspects.138 What Vernant heard at the roundtable did ‘not prevent [him] from affirming, legend or history, that Lucie Aubrac is an exceptional person, incomparable in her way, and that one must admire her en bloc, as she is, and without reservation’. 139 The myth of Lucie Aubrac was born well

136

Libération, 9 July 1997, vii (Jean-Pierre Vernant). When Cordier published his account of Caluire in 1999, he called it ‘the most plausible according to my own experience of the Resistance’. In other words, he too drew upon this experience unavailable to a later generation of historians. Jean Moulin. La République des catacombes (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 433. 137 Benamou, C’était un temps déraisonnable, 91-92. On the relations established in the Quartier Latin and in the Resistance, see Vernant, Entre mythe et politique, 17-31. Fellow Libération-Sud resister Serge Ravenel makes the same point in discussing Lucie Aubrac’s liberation of her husband in May 1943: ‘The episode upsets some historians, because it appears so improbable. But you have to put yourself in the climate of the period’. Benamou, C’était un temps déraisonnable, 118. 138 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Postface’ to François Hartog, Pauline Schmitt and Alain Schnapp, eds., Pierre Vidal-Naquet, un historien dans la cité (Paris: La Découverte, 1998), 225-226. 139 Libération, 12-13 July 1997 (Jean-Pierre Vernant).

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before her husband’s escape and was what led resisters to take chances with her. In demolishing myth, one is taking apart history, not restoring it. Historians raised another subject of importance to the new academic history of the Resistance: the rank-and-file members of Resistance organizations. Cordier referred to the soutiers de la gloire, Resistance leader Pierre Brossolette’s term for the faceless mass of resisters for whom, Cordier believed, the Aubracs had assumed responsibility when they became celebrities of the Resistance. Lucie Aubrac’s Ils partiront dans l’ivresse had originally been read as an expression of the women left out of Resistance history. But the success of the book made her a singular heroine, far from the world of the soutiers de la gloire. Vernant responded that celebration of the anonymous resister interfered with historians’ ability to interpret the individual.140 The question of whether the Aubracs had cooperated with the Gestapo was not a primary concern of academic historians of the Resistance. They acknowledged the issue to show the fallibility of resisters as sources of their own history: the Aubracs were responsible for suspicions raised about them, not because of their actions in 1943, but because of inconsistencies in the ways they later told the story of these events. Work on the Occupation since the late 1960s made clear that the postwar representation of the majority of the French as a people in resistance had been a myth. Central to the new historiography of the Resistance was the contention that presentation of the Resistance as an unified movement was also a postwar myth that had effaced the bitter conflicts among individuals and movements which characterized the Resistance. For Azéma, failure to deal with divisions in the Resistance—to tell the truth about the Resistance—was a form of ‘political correctness’, like the earlier injunction against disheartening the workers of Billancourt by telling the truth about Communism. 141 Historians confirmed their understanding of the divisions in the Resistance by interpreting the Aubrac Affair itself as evidence of the persistence of these conflicts. Attacks on Lucie Aubrac for recruiting Communists she had met before the war into Libération-Sud were clearly elements of the contemporary effort to refight the Resistance as an anti-Communist struggle. But historians at the roundtable had challenged this approach in their critique of Wolton’s work. In the conflict over the Aubracs, Cordier suggested that the campaign against the Aubracs could be receiving support from Combat veterans who saw it as revenge for attacks made on them by the Aubracs during the trials 140

Vernant suggested that Bédarida’s hostility toward the Aubracs was that of a foot soldier in the Resistance to leaders like the Aubracs. He believes that Bédarida spoke as one of the mass of resisters, soutiers de la gloire, who feared that the fame of leaders effaced memory of the devotion and heroism of each resister and the risks they took. La Traversée, 56-57. 141 Libération, 28 August 1997 (Jean-Pierre Azéma).

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of Hardy.142 Rousso saw the old conflict between the interior Resistance, represented by the Aubracs, and the exterior Resistance, represented by Cordier, ‘rise up again’.143 This interpretation had special appeal to Rousso because it made the conflict one between resisters rather than solely between resisters and historians. The unity of the Resistance generated one of the few exchanges at the roundtable between the Aubracs and historians based on different interpretations of the Resistance rather than the guilt or innocence or unreliable memories of the Aubracs. Academic historiography of Caluire has moved away from resisters’ assessment of Hardy’s personal failings, not to the search for another individual betrayer, but to the context of the conflicts between Combat, led by Frenay, and Moulin.144 Frenay’s portrayal of Moulin as a ‘cryptocommunist’ revealed nothing about Moulin, but evoked the bitter conflicts between Frenay and Moulin, envoy of the exterior Resistance. The Aubracs are fervent defenders of the unity of the French Resistance. They frequently cite France’s fortuitous escape from the civil wars of postwar Greece and Yugoslavia. 145 For Raymond Aubrac, the non-dit of the Resistance, which he believed historians did not take adequately into account, was ‘the considerable camaraderie and solidarity. It is certain that there was conflict between Frenay and Moulin, but I am sure that the former would have been ready, even at the worst moments of the conflict, to risk his life for Jean Moulin. I have no doubt of this’.146 ‘Most controversies in the Resistance’, Raymond Aubrac contended, concerned tactics, ‘much more than the political debates which have become the fonds de commerce of many historians’. 147 At the roundtable, Bédarida and Azéma asked about relations of Combat to Libération-Sud and to Moulin on the eve of the Caluire 142

Libération, 8 April 1997 (interview with Cordier by Olivier Wieviorka). For the charge that Cordier was settling accounts with Libération-Sud, see Libération, 21 July 1997 (Geoffrey d'Astier de La Vigerie). 143 Rousso, La Hantise, 135. Rousso and Conan offer a revealing commentary on Cordier, which helps explain his attitude toward the Aubracs: Cordier ‘has kept the “institutional” view of things which was that of Jean Moulin. Hence his difficulty in accounting for the rebellious, intuitive, and at times disorderly character that was the trademark of the leaders of the Resistance, before de Gaulle enlisted them in “his” great army of the night’. Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 160. 144 Libération, 9 July 1997, xii. 145 Raymond Aubrac, The French Resistance 1940-1944, trans. Louise Guiney (Paris: Hazan, 1997), 38. The French projected their fears onto Central Europe. During the Occupation, supporters of Marshall Pétain believed he prevented the polonisation of France. 146 ‘“Les Français sont capables de comprendre ce qui s’est passé dans leur pays”: Entretien avec Raymond et Lucie Aubrac’, in Bernard-Henri Lévy, ed., Archives d’un procès. Klaus Barbie (Paris: Livre de poche, 1986), 218. 147 Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 86.

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rendez-vous. In the one clear instance in the day-long roundtable of a postwar reevaluation of wartime events, Raymond Aubrac assessed sympathetically Frenay’s efforts in 1943 to bypass Moulin and the Free French by seeking funding from the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an act which had infuriated Moulin and other resistance groups at the time. Douzou, the historian at the roundtable who had worked most closely with the Aubracs, could only note that ‘the Raymond Aubrac who confides his memories is much more irenic than the one of 1943’.148 No conflict among resisters during the war seemed as real to the Raymond Aubrac of 1997 as that between historians and their rebellious subjects. *

*

*

Everyone has the right to be respected in that which is most human, and filial piety is part of that. Everyone… even resisters. —Antoine Prost 149

The roundtable revealed conflicts among academic historians as to how the history of the Resistance should be researched and written. Successor to the CHDGM, the IHTP had called upon the Aubracs and other resisters to participate in their programs in the past. The Aubracs recalled their relations with the institution before the controversy over Bartosek’s work. For Raymond Aubrac, ‘It would seem that Lucie and Raymond Aubrac by their writings, by their oral interventions... are guilty of mythology. Then why have invited them, for decades, to participate in work groups of the IHTP...? If these two presumed cultivators of the myth are guilty of being put on a pedestal, who put them there, if not those who now want to oppose them to the “soutiers de la gloire”’? As for Ils partiront dans l'ivresse, Raymond Aubrac sees ‘its current censors as having first covered it with praise’. 150 ‘Who made me a star?’, asked Lucie Aubrac. ‘It was the 148

Libération, 9 July 1997, xii (Laurent Douzou). Le Monde, 12 July 1997 (Antoine Prost). 150 Libération, 10 July 1998 (Raymond Aubrac). In The Vichy Syndrome, 276-277, 359n77, Rousso recognized Ils partiront dans l'ivresse as ‘one of the most sensitive accounts of underground life’ (while implicitly lamenting that it far outsold historical works on the Occupation by Robert Paxton and others). A decade later, however, Rousso was deeply trounbled by the appearance of Ils partiront dans l'ivresse as a piece of history and Lucie Aubrac's current position that it was true to her emotional experience. Libération, 11 July 1997 (Henry Rousso). Before historians, literary critics recognized that Ils partiront dans l’ivresse was a text that by its nature raised issues of verifiability for readers. Pierre Gamarra began his review of Aubrac’s memoir, ‘There is for the child, the beginning reader, an obsession: how to distinguish the truth, the real, the lived, the invented, the imaginary? This is the source of the many questions he poses about the real existence of 149

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IHTP’.151 But it was precisely this history of relations with resisters that could make IHTP historians feel that they would be examined to see if they were going to buttress an ‘official history’ of the Resistance embodied by the Aubracs. Rousso explained his perception of the situation: ‘Slandered resisters thought that they could use the legitimacy of academics thus invited [to the roundtable] to get out of an embarrassing situation. They committed the error of believing that it would be easy to intimidate and to use historians who were evidently going to find themselves in a delicate position’. To what he saw as resisters’ efforts to use historians, he responded: ‘Il faut y résister’.152 The strongest support for Azéma and historians associated with the IHTP came from the resister and accomplished historian Cordier. He offered academic historians the panegyric they could never have offered themselves: ‘On the ground of History—that which interests us because it is that of posterity—only the historians are competent to research the truth and to say it. Their training, their scholarship, their statute confers on them an unequaled scientific authority (at the same time a moral authority), to establish the historical truth and to win approval....Only [competent historians] have the power to smash the slander and to preserve your reputation....[Historians'] insight, supported by a faultless honesty, permits them to accomplish miracles in the order of knowledge’. For Cordier, historians were the heroes of the roundtable: ‘they put into play more than their careers, their reputations, when they declared unanimously: the Aubracs are innocent [of Chauvy’s charges] unreservedly and without a doubt’. 153 But there were many critics of the roundtable who were not present. Raymond Aubrac had been asked by Azéma to explain why he had not been sent to Paris like others arrested at Caluire. In exasperation, Raymond Aubrac responded that ‘it's not my job to explain Barbie's errors’.154 The legendary Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld—who had tracked down Barbie—responded after the roundtable with a plausible explanation as to why Raymond Aubrac was not sent to Paris and offered a spirited attack on the historians who interrogated the Aubracs: ‘Frustrated perhaps not to have lived a period as fascinating as that of the Second World War, when some made history instead of simply writing it, they attempt to take power over this period in giving good and bad grades as

places, of events, of heroes. The adult retains this concern, notably in the matter of the authenticity of episodes and their autobiographical value’. Review of Ils partiront dans l'ivresse in L’Europe 669-670 (January-February 1985): 171. 151 Libération, 10 July 1997 (Lucie Aubrac). 152 Rousso, La Hantise, 131. 153 Libération, 11 July 1997 (Daniel Cordier). 154 Libération, 9 July 1997, xvi-xvii (Jean-Pierre Azéma and Raymond Aubrac); 10 July 1997 (Raymond Aubrac) (quoted).

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they think fit to living and deceased historical actors’.155 If the Barbie trial had threatened to pit memory of the Resistance against memory of the Holocaust over the issue of the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity, but not war crimes, the Aubrac Affair fostered an entente between the two memory traditions; history brought together what the law had sundered.156 The most sustained critique of the roundtable came from academic historians of twentieth-century France. As academic historians, they shared with historians at the roundtable the belief that history was not premised on documents per se, but on the procedures for analyzing and assessing texts. No condemnation of the historians at the roundtable was harsher than that of Antoine Prost, who had been a critic of Bartosek’s L’Aveu des archives as well. He compared the roundtable to the Inquisition and to Stalinist show trials.157 Yet Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire is the very authority Azéma cites in asserting the obligation of historians to question Resistance heroes.158 All academic historians agreed that one should start with a study of the police and judicial procedures during the Occupation and the texts these generated in order to evaluate Chauvy’s documentation. 159 But critical academic historians went on to apply the same logic 155

Le Monde, 25 July 1997 (Serge Klarsfeld); Libération, 28 August 1997 (Jean-Pierre Azéma); Libération, 1 September 1997 (Serge Klarsfeld) (quoted). Azéma had taken on Klarsfeld in the past. Conan and Rousso, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past, 53. Azéma in turn defended his critical examination of the Aubracs’ testimony by aligning himself with Raul Hilberg in his conflicts with Yad Vashem for questioning elements of Holocaust orthodoxy. Libération, 28 August 1997. 156 In addition to Klarsfeld’s pieces, see Adam Rayski, ‘Il n’y a plus d’“affaire Aubrac”’, La Lettre des résistants et déportés juifs 35 (September-October 1997): 10-11. 157 Le Monde, 12 July 1997 (Antoine Prost). 158 Azéma, ‘Il n'y a pas d' “affaire Aubrac”’, 81. 159 Le Monde, 17 July 1997 (Claire Andrieu and Diane de Bellescize). Delpla, a widely published lycée history professor and therefore an insider/outsider to the university-based realm of academic history, took this one step further. He explores the reasons why the stories which storytellers relate might have differed over time depending on the conditions in which the storytelling was done, the storyteller's psychological state, and the influence of information given to storytellers at the time they are telling their story. The texts produced by the Aubracs are themselves historical documents conditioned by the situations and constraints under which they were produced. Memory is not simply a more or less accurate or precise account of the past; it takes place in a present. Delpla argues that contradictions in the Aubracs' accounts are not necessarily indications of a hidden guilt nor need they be a frustration to historians. These contradictions, when analyzed within the historical context of the documents’ creation, may themselves provide useful evidence to historians. Delpla, Aubrac, 97. See Delpla's explanations of the variance in the dates Raymond Aubrac gave for his first arrest as the result of the influence of the later introduction of erroneous contemporaneous documents (ibid., 39); and of resisters’ reiteration of the cover stories they believed at the time, although documentation available now shows that the authorities did not

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to the procedures of the roundtable itself. Historians should not carry out research by interrogating witnesses, making them admit and explain contradictions in their testimony over the years. Claire Andrieu and Diane de Bellescize saw Cartesian doubt giving way to suspicion that could not be answered. Although no contemporary documents exist saying that Raymond Aubrac was a double agent or that Lucie Aubrac had unwittingly led the Gestapo to her husband’s parents, they were expected to refute such hypotheses. ‘If one extends this reasoning, each victim of a totalitarian system will soon have to prove his or her innocence’.160 ‘The subtle relations between historians and witnesses cannot be summed up in a game of question-answer in the strained climate of face-to-face’ interrogation. 161 As for the issue of the Aubracs as heroes, the historians critical of the roundtable argued that ‘there is demagogy in opposing the “soutiers de la gloire” to the “grands témoins”’. Raymond Aubrac's too-frequent sincerity that there are details he cannot recall irritated historians at the roundtable but generated sympathy among those not present. If anything, Raymond Aubrac took on new heroic qualities for these historians. A hero is not just someone who performs great actions, but one whose humane qualities stand out in an inhumane environment. The struggle over memory creates new heroes because of what they must go through today. ‘Raymond Aubrac, lost and staggering, did not appear “deheroized”; on the contrary the “hero”, the man who risked his life, appeared human, and thus greater, faced with the inhuman insinuations formulated in the comfort of an editorial room’.162 At the roundtable, the Aubracs became the victims they had never been before in a culture that is uncertain about actors, but honors believe them (ibid., 47). Delpla offers a much fuller psychological portrait of Lucie Aubrac than Chauvy or the roundtable historians. Chauvy makes much of a story which appeared in a September 1945 issue of La Marseillaise under Lucie Aubrac's name that failed to make clear that Raymond Aubrac was released earlier than his three comrades in May 1943 due to her reckless intervention with the procureur. For Chauvy, this shows that Lucie Aubrac was trying to hide a special arrangement with Barbie that assured her husband’s early release. Her defenders attributed inaccuracies in the newspaper account to the precocious mediatization of her account; a reporter must have interviewed her and then written the story in her name. Le Monde, 23 May 1997 (Gilles Perrault). Delpla perceptively suggests from his reading of Ils partiront dans l'ivresse that Lucie Aubrac felt bad about the risks she had taken to free Raymond Aubrac before his comrades and that this, rather than treachery or the media, may explain the variant of her story in La Marseillaise. Delpla, Aubrac, 67-70. 160 Le Monde, 17 July 1997 (Claire Andrieu and Diane de Bellescize). Claire Andrieu was author of a scathing review of Chauvy’s Aubrac Lyon 1943 in Vingtième Siècle 56 (October-December 1997): 251-253. Bougeard and Guillon make the same point about the difference between historians’ ‘methodical doubt’ and the ‘generalized suspicion’ of the media with reference to the Aubrac Affair. ‘La Résistance et l’histoire, passé/present’, 44. 161 Libération, 25 July 1998 (Claire Andrieu, et. al.). 162 Ibid.

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victims.163 Critics did not recognize the roundtable as an exposure of resisters’ deficiencies as chroniclers of their past. They treated the roundtable as a research project and decried the practices of carrying out research in a newspaper editorial room and publishing inconclusive research findings in a supplement to a daily paper. ‘There is not an Aubrac affair, but an affair of the conception and mediatization of history’, concluded a letter from eleven academic historians that appeared in Libération after publication of the roundtable.164 Jean-Noël Jeanneney suggested that historians concerned with the process of historical investigation had ignored the presentation of their research, which is equally a crucial element of ‘scientific’ academic history. For Jeanneney, the published interrogation of the Aubracs produced such consternation ‘because it was presented in a brute form to a vast public poorly informed of the customs, rules, and demands of the historical profession…. Imagine, on the contrary, that this document had provided the basis of a synthetic work on the questions raised, imagine that it had been published in a journal or bulletin of the CNRS, public certainly, but marked with the particular seal of scientific research’.165 That is to say, imagine that Chauvy’s book had given rise to an issue of the Cahiers de l’IHTP like that devoted to Moulin after the publication of Wolton’s book. The historians’ critique was revealing. Historians at the roundtable had seen the Aubracs as memory militants, whose memoirs were widely read and whose wartime experience had been the subject of a big-budget film. To protect their craft, historians had to step out of the seminar room and into the journalists’ domain. But what happened when they did so? Academic historian Christophe Prochasson depicted the roundtable as a ‘spectacle akin to a lynching’.166 Doubt shifted seats. Prochasson questioned the roundtable historians: ‘It is possible that the researchers who accepted their part in this business hoped to be able to turn this scene to their advantage, though perhaps there were other motives involved as well’. Rousso was no happier to have the split among historians over the rules and ethics of historical research fought out in public than were resisters to have their history written as the history of divisions in their own ranks. Rousso responded that it was he and his colleagues who were

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The disgusted Azéma saw such apologia as yet another effort to grant resisters a ‘special status’. Libération, 28 August 1997 (Jean-Pierre Azéma). 164 Liberation, 25 July 1997 (Claire Andrieu, et. al.). 165 Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Le Passé dans le prétoire. L’Historien, le juge et le journaliste (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 116-117. 166 Christophe Prochasson, ‘Is There a “Crisis” of History in France?’, AHA Perspectives (May 1998): 10.

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being unfairly brought before a tribunal.167 But when the affair did go to court, historians were the absent presence. *

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Raymond Aubrac: An intolerable blow to honor. At another time, it is not before a tribunal that one would have settled this affair. Jean-Yves Monfort [presiding judge in 17e chambre correctionnelle de Paris]: On the dueling grounds [le pré]? Raymond Aubrac: On the dueling grounds, yes. 168

When things got particularly heated in the roundtable discussion, Rousso remarked to Raymond Aubrac: ‘A detail struck me: the first to note [mettre en évidence] the contradictions in your successive declarations on what happened after your arrest at Caluire was neither an historian nor a journalist in search of a scoop, but an examining magistrate, Judge Hamy himself, whom you had solicited [in his defense against the Vergès/Barbie’s testament]’. Aubrac responded that he had written a response for Judge Hamy that was in the judicial dossier with the testament, but that Chauvy had neglected to reproduce it.169 However, Rousso’s effort to bring judges in line with investigative journalists and academic historians as questioners of the Aubracs’ accounts played out differently than his observation suggested. Three days before the roundtable— May 14, the day on which the Aubracs had sworn always to be together and which Lucie Aubrac had incorrectly given as the date of her husband’s release in Ils partiront dans l’ivresse at the urging of her editor170—the Aubracs sued Chauvy and his publisher Albin Michel for defamation. A month later, their lawyer Georges Kiejman filed a thirty-page condemnation of Aubrac Lyon 1943 that underscored its illegitimacy by showing point by point how it followed the 167

Rousso, La Hantise, 126-127. For other accounts of the Aubrac affair, see Hanna Diamond and Claire Gorrara, ‘Occupation memories: French history and the Aubrac affair in the 1990s’, in William Kidd and Brian Murdoch, eds., Memory and Memorials: The Commemorative Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 233-244; Douzou, La Résistance, 262-272; Jean-Marie Guillon, ‘L’Affaire Aubrac, ou la dérive d’une certaine façon de faire l’histoire’, Modern & Contemporary France 7(1) (1999): 89-93; Leah D. Hewitt, ‘Identity Wars in “L’Affaire (Lucie) Aubrac”: History, Fiction, Film’, Contemporary French Civilization XXII (1998): 264-284; and Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crisis of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 36-61. 168 Libération, 7-8 February 1998 (François Devinat). 169 Libération, 9 July 1997, xvii (Henry Rousso and Raymond Aubrac). 170 Jean-Claude Guillebaud, ‘Calomnie d'outre-tombe’, Le Nouvel observateur, 24-30 October 1991, 57.

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narrative in the Vergès/Barbie testament. Such a document is probably along the lines of what the Aubracs had hoped the historians’ roundtable would produce. If the Vichy Syndrome has been enacted in trials for crimes against humanity, conflicts over the history and memory of the Resistance have often taken place in defamation trials. The memory of the Resistance is of an individual and collective affirmation of honor, and to break the hold of the Resistance over France and resisters’ hold over the history of the Resistance, can involve dis-honoring resisters. When either resisters or their critics do not pursue defamation suits when their character and actions are challenged, this is often taken as an implicit acceptance of the accusations.171 Claude Bal’s film Que la verité est amère led to successful defamation suits by the Aubracs against Bal, Hardy and Vergès in 1985 and 1987, as well as an unsuccessful one by Hardy against Klaus Barbie 172 and two unsuccessful ones by Hardy against Lucie Aubrac.173 Wolton unsuccessfully sued Cordier for his comments about Le Grand recrutement, and Bartosek said he had taken out some of his comments on Raymond Aubrac in Les Aveux des archives for fear of a defamation suit.174 In legal terms, defamation is an attack on an individual’s honor based on presentation of particular facts. An individual can defend himself against a charge of defamation by proving the truth of the facts only if they took place during the last ten years, or by proving his good faith. To prove good faith, the individual accused of defamation must show all of the following: the goal pursued in making the statement in question was legitimate, the absence of personal malice, the seriousness of the research undertaken and the reliability of the sources, and the prudence and moderation of expression in the statements under examination.175 The Aubracs brought charges against Chauvy under the 171

See Faligot and Kauffer, Les Résistants, on Hardy’s failure to pursue Raymond Aubrac for a 1972 interview in Le Nouvel observateur in which he accused Hardy of having betrayed Caluire; and L’Humanité, 12 February 1998 ( Jean-Paul Monferran), on Chauvy’s and Vergès’ failure to pursue Delpla for his attacks on them in his book defending the Aubracs. Courtois asks why the Cot family turned to historians to clear Pierre Cot of the charges Wolton made against him rather than pursuing a defamation case against Wolton. “Cot souhaite”, 3. 172 Le Monde, 2 November 1985. 173 Le Monde, 14 December 1984; 28 June 1985. Claude Berri was not so fortunate. Hardy’s daughter sued him successfully for having presented Hardy as responsible for the arrests at Caluire in Berri’s film, Lucie Aubrac. Libération, 3 June 1999. 174 Myriam Barbera, ‘L’histoire n’est ni de droite ni de gauche’ [interview with Bartosek], Regards sur la Cité 21 (February 1997): 8. 175 Claire Andrieu, ‘Gérard Chauvy et Albin Michel condamnés pour diffamation publique envers les Aubrac’, Voix et Visages 265 (May-June 1999): 11.

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press law of 29 July 1881 that punished defamation against public functionaries, including members of the armed services. The first post-Occupation amnesty law of 5 January 1951 had sought not only to put the memory of collaboration to rest, but also to nurture memory of the Resistance. It specified that Resistance movements were protected from defamation under the 29 July 1881 press law; the courts later interpreted this protection to include the leaders and members of Resistance groups. In bringing suit, the Aubracs were protecting not solely their honor as individual citizens, but the honor of the Resistance. The defamation trial was the complement to the roundtable. Historians had repeatedly told the Aubracs that in making themselves representatives of the Resistance, they had taken on greater responsibility for their story. But those who defamed representatives of the Resistance took on greater legal responsibility as well. Because the facts in question had taken place more than ten years before, Chauvy’s defense was necessarily to show good faith. The goal—a history of the Resistance—was clearly legitimate and Chauvy had not displayed personal malice to the Aubracs. Debate centered on Chauvy’s research methods. Historians at the roundtable had summarily dismissed Chauvy’s work in order to examine the Aubracs. But Chauvy, absent as both an individual and an historian from the roundtable, was called to testify in his defense at the defamation trial in February 1998. The trial mirrored the roundtable with Chauvy taking the Aubracs’ place. Roundtable historians had frequently praised Chauvy’s 173-page appendix of twenty-one documents. In contrast, the Aubracs’ lawyer introduced important dossiers from the Rhône department archives and the military archives at Blanc (Indre) that Chauvy had not consulted, and that cast doubt on the Barbie/Vergès testament and Chauvy’s use of it.176 However, it was the presiding judge Jean-Yves Monfort who took the historians’ role of shaming the accused by revealing the consequences of failures to analyze documents well rather than, as for the Aubracs, failure to tell a story consistently. Monfort suggested that historians speak through documents they present uncritically and bear consequences for the conclusions readers are encouraged to draw from them. In this, the Aubrac trial differed significantly from earlier Resistance defamation trials that had not been decided by examination in court of the defendant’s historical research. The judge’s decision in the Aubracs’ successful suit for defamation against Bal and Vergès had turned on resisters’ unanimous testimony of their ‘admiration and confidence’ in the Aubracs, rather than evidence on historical research.177 The judge had rejected Wolton’s defamation suit against Cordier with reference to the community 176

The lawyer for Albin Michel could not resist making Chauvy the persecuted Dreyfus by referring to the dossier from the departmental archives as the ‘petit bleu’. Le Monde, 8-9 Febuary 1998 (Nicolas Weill). 177 Le Monde, 4 May 1987 (J.-H. Théolleyre) (quoted); 17 February 1988; 28 May 1988.

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of academic historians who faulted Wolton for his failure to use proper historial method to analyze the documents, not by making such a finding himself. Like the roundtable historians speaking frankly to the Aubracs, Monfort took his role as saying to Chauvy what many were thinking in order to give him the same chance to respond as the historians had given the Aubracs. At the roundtable, Cordier had said to Lucie Aubrac that he sensed she felt the same outrage that General de Gaulle would have felt if asked to prove that he had written the appel of 18 June (1940).178 Monfort asked Chauvy if his way of reading archives would not lead to proof that de Gaulle was not author of the appel of 18 June.179 Monfort grilled Chauvy on the serious inconsistencies in Barbie’s accounts of events over time, a subject Chauvy left unexamined in his book. In response to Monfort’s questioning, Chauvy’s inability to remember how he had first gotten hold of the Vergès/Barbie testament shed a new light on Raymond Aubrac’s claims not to remember specific elements of events that had happened decades earlier. And Monfort asked if Chauvy’s obsessive search for inconsistencies in the Aubracs’ accounts over the years could not be seen as borrowing from the methods of Holocaust deniers.180 ‘If the contradictions bring nothing to the debate’, asked Monfort, ‘why not set them aside?’ 181 Or, more bluntly, ‘Thanks to you, after his death, Barbie attained his goal. In walking the elephant of his report in the porcelain shop of the Resistance, you have broken everything to verify that there was no reason to do so’. 182 Chauvy’s lawyers defended him in the name of the historian’s ‘right of irreverence’.183 They called to testify resisters who resented the preeminent place of the Aubracs in representations of the Resistance184, as well as prominent antiCommunist intellectuals Thierry Pfister (Chauvy’s editor), Jean-François Revel and 178

Libération, 11 July 1997 (Daniel Cordier). Libération, 6 February 1998 (François Devinat). 180 Le Figaro, 6 February 1998 (Armelle Héliot). Although it was not Chauvy’s intention to cultivate this constituency, his attack on the Aubracs was applauded by Holocaust deniers: ‘For revisionism, the Aubrac Affair is adorned with decisive importance. It is necessary to break the myths of the Resistance. This opens the way to the work of history and of truth…. Saint Lucie is caught with her feet on the carpet in the midst of the Assumption [en pleine Assumption]… the ceremonies of a spectacular beatification…. Most important is that on the occasion of this affair, and the polemics about the book of Gérard Chauvy, Aubrac, Lyon 1943, the Judaic-Gaullist-Stalinian front has exploded and all are left to think for themselves’. ‘L’affaire Aubrac’, Bulletin de la Vieille Taupe (1998). http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/archVT/bullVT/bullVT6.html (accessed 16 January 2007). 181 Le Figaro, 13 February 1998 (Armelle Héliot). 182 Le Monde, 7 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). 183 Le Figaro, 20 February 1998 (Armelle Héliot). 184 Le Monde, 14 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). 179

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historian (and first reader of Chauvy’s manuscript) Stéphane Courtois.185 For Pfister and other anti-Communists, questions about Raymond Aubrac’s account of his activities at BERIM cast doubt on the truthfulness of his accounts of Resistance activities.186 But, unlike earlier defamation trials, that of Chauvy was not argued on the basis of the reputations of the resisters or historians who intervened. The Libération-Sud leaders Ravanel and Kriegel-Valrimont testified not as guarantors of the Aubracs’ character, but as exemplars of the type of oral sources Chauvy was faulted for having failed to consult. Cordier made an appearance not in person, but by letter, and not as a resister but as an historian, to confirm that his soon-to-bepublished research assured him that the Aubracs were not the source of Barbie’s information on the meeting at Caluire.187 Lawyers for the two sides embodied the imbricated nature of the Vichy Syndrome in some individuals’ personal and professional lives. When the lawyer for Albin Michel, Alain Jakubowicz, accused Georges Kiejman, son of a Jewish déportee and Mitterrand’s ministre délégué à la Justice, of having shielded Mitterrand’s friend and Vichy chief of police René Bousquet from trial for crimes against humanity, Kiejman’s response was such that the presiding judge had to suspend the proceedings.188 Concurrently with the trial of Chauvy, Jakubowicz was representing the Consistoire israélite and B’nai Brith de France at the trial of Maurice Papon. Papon could not resist asking Jakubowicz, ‘Would it be indiscrete to ask you where you were Thursday? You spread your great talents elsewhere… in another trial, God knows if it is as historic’.189 In April 1998, concomitant with Papon’s condemnation, the court found Chauvy and Albin Michel guilty of ‘defamation by insinuation’, subject to the same penalties as direct defamation. The Aubracs gave the 400,000 francs in damages they received to the Fondation de la Résistance to further memory of the Resistance. The taboo the court found Chauvy and his publisher to have broken was the publication of the Vergès/Barbie testament without a critical apparatus, and his reliance on it for his accusatory narrative. The court also pointed to 185

Le Monde, 27 February 1997. Courtois had conducted a sympathetic interview with Chauvy for Historia 604 (April 1997): 9. See also ‘Affaire Aubrac. Révélations sur le livre interdit’, Lyon ‘Mag (March 1997): 41-45 and Le Monde, 8-9 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). Courtois stands out for finding questions about Lucie Aubrac’s role in the arrest of Raymond Aubrac’s parents normal. Michel Raffoul, ‘Les Polémiques sur la Résistance’, Le Nouvel économiste 1088 (3 October 1997): 118-119. 186 Le Monde, 14 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). Vernant, a former Communist himself, felt that the ‘insupportable atmosphere of suspicion’ at the roundtable had been fed by an unstated assumption that as individuals who had links to the party, the Aubracs could be hiding things. La Traversée, 58. 187 Le Monde, 8-9 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). Azéma reached the same conclusion in Jean Moulin: le politique, le rebelle, le résistant (Paris: Perrin 2003). 188 L’Humanité, 13 February 1998. 189 Éric Conan, Le Procès Papon (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 200.

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Chauvy’s decision not to interview surviving resisters involved in the events in question and his unquestioning reliance on German documentation. His failure to adhere to the basic rules of historical method in assessing and analyzing historical documentation undercut his claim to have acted in good faith. The court concluded: It is not the court’s role to do history, to judge the exactitude of scientific work, or to decide controversies raised by it. This is a matter for scholars and ultimately for public opinion. However, the judges’ mission requires that they not abdicate before the scholar (or those who claim to be such), and that they pronounce judgment (dire le droit), contributing, in their manner, to the regulation of social relations. Judges should not, therefore, in the name of some superior imperative of historical truth, renounce protection of the right of honor and of consideration of those who, thrown into the torment of the war, were the necessary, but valiant, actors. Rendered into illustrious myths by their contemporaries, these men and these women have not become, for all that, simple objects of study, stripped of their personality, deprived of feeling, their own destiny expropriated in the name of scientific utility. For having forgotten, for having lost view of the social responsibility of the historian, and for having fallen short of the essential rules of historical method, 190 the accused Gérard Chauvy cannot be accorded the benefit of good faith.

While spokesmen for investigative journalists saw the verdict as evidence that courts were taking on the role of protectors of ‘official history’, there were few tears shed for Chauvy among academic historians of the Resistance, who saw his work as unworthy of their guild. The roundtable had dismissed consideration of Chauvy’s account in favor of an examination of inconsistencies in the Aubracs’ accounts. But, as Nicolas Weill wrote during the trial, ‘Rarely has the opposition between judges and historians been so sharp’.191 Azéma attacked the judgment for suggesting that resisters were citizens deserving of protection from the travails of being ‘subjects of study’, which he saw as encouraging their illicit desire to monitor the writing of the history of the Resistance. By the same token, Azéma rejected the court’s appraisal of a proper historical methodology, particularly the idea that good contemporary history requires witnesses’ testimony.192 Courtois condemned evocation of the ‘social

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Collection of the IHTP. Judgment of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (17ème chambre), no. 9714202417 (2 April 1998). 191 Le Monde, 15-16 February 1998 (Nicolas Weill). 192 Jean-Pierre Azéma and Georges Kiejman, ‘L’histoire au tribunal’, Le Débat 102 (November-December 1998): 45-51.

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responsibility’ of the historian as ‘worthy of the Soviet system’.193 However, academic historians who had criticized the roundtable took solace in the judgment. Jean-Marie Guillon saw it as a ‘veritable lesson’ in deontology and historical methodology. ‘For once, if we have reason to rejoice over a historically pertinent and well argued judicial decision, it is because well-known historians contributed to spreading confusion’.194 *

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The ambiguous qualities of the witness sustain a misunderstanding with the historians. They stir up latent conflicts, like those between old couples whose disagreements are a bond as tenacious as their dead feelings. The resentful old actors do not find in the history of the Resistance the words they themselves would have put down, like the demanding lovers deceived by a love letter, in which the sentiments do not answer their exulted expectations. 195 —Daniel Cordier

If individuals accused of crimes of collaboration during the Occupation must be found and coerced by the courts to testify, many historians have seen resisters’ desire to witness, to keep alive the Resistance as they know it and as they feel France needs to know it, as an impediment to historical analysis. Like the French Revolution, the Resistance has the qualities of an unfinished narrative, and although many academic historians disagreed with Furet about Wolton’s analysis of Moulin, they also sense that their task would be facilitated by establishing that la Résistance est terminée. Academic historians at the roundtable dismissed Chauvy’s study of the Aubracs as the work of a historiant, but his accusations offered leading figures among them an opportunity to reveal the unreliability of resisters’ accounts as the basis of the history of the Resistance. They did not believe that the Aubracs had betrayed Moulin, but that they had betrayed the fidelity history demands. Historians, however, are not alone in passing judgment on the practice of history. Judge Monfort offended representatives of the otherwise hostile communities of academic history and

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Sales, ‘Stéphane Courtois’, 33. This echoes Courtois’ earlier condemnation of François Bédarida’s evocation of the ‘social responsibility’ of the historian in ‘Les responsabilités de l’historien “expert”’, Autrement 151 (January 1995): 136. Courtois, “Cot souhaite”, 73. 194 Guillon, ‘L’Affaire Aubrac’, 90. See also Andrieu, ‘Gérard Chauvy et Albin Michel condamnés’, 11. 195 Cordier, ‘L’historien face à la Résistance’, 17. Raymond Aubrac responded in kind: ‘Cordier is a sentimental sort. He can be violent, abrupt, and at a certain time, feel the need to reset the clock’. Libération, 7-8 February 1998 (François Devinat).

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investigative journalism by asserting the ‘social responsibility’ of the historian to follow legal norms in the research and analysis of contemporary history. Historians of the world in which they live face challenges from historical actors who are not satisfied to be actors performing in historians’ représentations of a past they believe themselves to have authored. Investigative journalists enmeshed in the Resistance Complex assume the role of resisters against the authority they see wielded by duplicitous forefathers. Academic historians of the Resistance are in their element refuting these stepsiblings, suspect for their origins in the media and the market. Assertive academic historians at the roundtable had no pretensions to resisters’ status as resisters against injustice; they wanted resisters’ other power, as narrators of a Resistance past. This gave the roundtable the qualities of a recommitment to the founding event of academic contemporary history, the placement of historical actors in history in order to wrest the presentation of historical events from them. Such a reenactment reveals academic historians’ complex position. Respect and remorse accompany such confrontations. When historians of the contemporary world sniff out a legend, that most human of creations, they know they have found their prey. To pursue legends, good historians must resemble ogres of legend, but they never lose their human traits. We smell their flesh too.

CHAPTER EIGHT THE GRANDCHILDREN OF GODARD AND THE AUBRACS: BETRAYAL, RESISTANCE, AND THE PEOPLE WITHOUT A MEMORY

The viewer is always willing to refer to an interpretation that then tells him that he did not understand everything, when he understands it all. But he wants to be able to draw it up in due form. We always look to interpret in a known way. —Jean-Luc Godard1 My way of moving forward, of putting together what I run across, is inspired by the work of historians…. In the jungle of signs, you have to inscribe a jardin à la française, which is History, thanks to which we don’t get lost…. —Jean-Luc Godard2 I remember seeing a movie in Lima in about 1957. It was called I Escaped from the Dead. It surprised me. It was about a prisoner who is an important member of the Resistance and escapes from Fort Montluc, after the distraction of a German guard. It was something that really happened shortly before Moulin's arrest. In the movie they mentioned me, it was interesting. There were so many exaggerations but the basic theme was true. Since nobody knew me, or had pictures of me, they showed in the film some weird guy as being the chief of the command, at the Hotel Terminus, near the centre, where the first quarters of my command in Lyon were established. The scenery was real and had been filmed in the very same quarters. I even recognized the decorative wall paper which had not been changed. I was presented as telling a prisoner, “You are condemned to death”. The truth is that I never condemned anybody. This was a function of the military courts. —Klaus Barbie 3 An earlier version of this essay with the same title appeared in French Cultural Studies 15:1 (February 2004): 76-92. (© Sage Publications Ltd., 2004) Permission to reprint has been granted by Sage Publications Ltd. 1 Marie Marvier, ‘Godard, éloge de l’amour et de scénario’ [interview with Godard], synopsis 13 (May-June 2001). 2 Jean-Michel Frodon, `“On ne peut pas raconter une histoire sans faire de l’Histoire”’, Le Monde, 17 May 2001.

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However, I am less critical [of Claude Berri’s film, Lucie Aubrac], since I learned that when it was shown in the United States, thousands of people better understood what fascism was. —Lucie Aubrac4

When I saw the resisters Lucie Aubrac and Raymond Aubrac in April 2002, I asked Raymond Aubrac if he had seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Éloge de l’amour. He hadn’t heard of the film, which features an aging Resistance couple, heroes who have sold the film rights to their story to Steven Spielberg. What surprised Raymond Aubrac was that in Godard’s film the couple’s last name before the war was Samuel, and that the couple had taken their Resistance name, Bayard, after the war. The Aubracs’ married name was Samuel and they too had taken the Resistance name, Aubrac, after the war. Released in 2001, Éloge de l’amour had been five years in the making. The film had its origins at a time of extensive media coverage of Lucie Aubrac (1997), Claude Berri’s film of Lucie Aubrac’s memoir, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse. Berri is not Spielberg, but they are both directors of epics with a penchant for films about World War II. The Bayards’ experience in the Resistance differs significantly from that of the Aubracs, but Éloge de l’amour addresses the memory of the French Resistance and the nature of resistance today, not the Resistance as an historical event. At several points in Éloge de l’amour viewers are told, `you cannot think of something unless you think of another thing’.5 Godard did not make a film about the Aubracs (or Berri’s Lucie Aubrac), but thinking about Éloge de l’amour in light of the Aubracs’ story, as Godard almost certainly did, opens up interpretation of his film. In Éloge de l’amour, Godard moves from one scene to the next by means of reference to something that occurred earlier, either in the film or chronologically, rather than progressing through a narrative. Let us follow Godard’s method. In 1939, Simone Signoret was a lycée student of Lucie Aubrac. She was named Simone Kaminker and her teacher Lucie Samuel. Lucie Aubrac saw teaching as a performance and it is not surprising that the future actress was taken with her. Madame Samuel, Signoret recalled, taught 3

Klaus Barbie, ‘A Gestapo Memoir’, in Robert Wilson, The Confessions of Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon (Vancouver: Arsenal Editions, 1984), 164. Barbie is referring to Robert Bresson’s film Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), which is based on a resister’s account of his escape from Montluc prison in 1943. 4 Jean-Claude Bourgault and Patrick Thiébault, ‘Lucie et Raymond Aubrac, “La résistance, une histoire qui reste à écrire…”’, Seconde Guerre mondiale 1939-1945 3 (July-August 2002): 13. 5 Jean-Luc Godard, Éloge de l’amour: phrases (sorties d’un film) (Paris: P.O.L., 2001), 66, 123.

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`with passion, with fire’.6 More than forty years later, Simone Signoret convinced Lucie Aubrac to write her memoirs, the memoirs Berri would film.7 Signoret deeply regretted not having participated in the Resistance, but became ‘the emblematic figure of an heroine of the Resistance’ in René Clément’s Le Jour et l’heure and Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres.8 The latter was drawn from Joseph Kessel’s novel, written during the war in response to Charles de Gaulle’s request for literature that would win American sympathy for the Free French. Kessel’s L’Armée des ombres was inspired by his conversations with Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, leader, and co-founder with Lucie Aubrac, of the Libération-Sud resistance movement.9 The character Mathilde in L’Armée des ombres, portrayed by Signoret in the film, almost certainly drew upon d’Astier de la Vigerie’s presentation to Kessel of the character of Lucie Aubrac.10 And Godard saw in wartime resister Melville the director he valued: ‘There is only one filmmaking. That’s yours’, Godard told Melville. ‘Why didn’t I do it? Because I didn’t know how’.11 6

Simone Signoret, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 37. Alain Riou, ‘Scènes de résistance’, Le Nouvel observateur, 20-26 February 1997, 55. 8 Catherine David, Simone Signoret ou la mémoire partagée (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990), 202. Nothing is simple in the remembering of the Resistance. The year after Lucie Aubrac published Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, Simone Signoret defended Des terroristes à la retraite, a film for which she had done the narration, which presented the charge that the Communists had betrayed the immigrant resisters’ groupe Manouchian as part of an effort to franciser the Communist Resistance. Signoret pushed Antenne 2 to broadcast the film. However, a ‘jury d’honneur’ composed of resisters, including the Aubracs, constituted by Haute Autorité de la communication audiovisuelle, recommended against broadcast of the film. Lucie Aubrac condemned Des terroristes à la retraite as poor history and, with a comment one could use for Éloge de l’amour, for a political aesthetics which betrayed memory of the Resistance: `those old resisters presented today with their wrinkles, this has a pitying [misérabiliste] side’. Le Matin, 30 May 1985. 9 Jean-Pierre Tuquoi, Emmanuel d’Astier. La plume et l’épee (Paris: Arléa, 1987), 156. 10 There is in turn a story within a story here. At the time Berri’s Lucie Aubrac was released, the journalist Gérard Chauvy had revived Klaus Barbie’s accusations that Lucie Aubrac had betrayed Jean Moulin in order to save her husband. L’Armée des ombres ends with Mathilde preparing to give names to the Gestapo in order to save her daughter, and giving signals to her comrades, signals that only those thinking as resisters could read, that they should kill her—so they reluctantly do. This is how Lucie Aubrac’s critics read variances in her tellings of her wartime experiences. With reluctance, they tell us, they fulfill their own fantasy of doing what resisters have to do. In a much earlier intertextual encounter in Roger Vailland’s widely-read Resistance novel, Le Drôle de jeu (1945), the resister Marat tells another turncoat Mathilde the story of Lucie Aubrac’s planning the escape of her husband (without mentioning the Aubracs by name). Roger Vailland, Le Drôle de jeu (Paris: La Clef, 1957), 44-46. 11 David, Simone Signoret, 200. 7

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Resistance chronicler Marcel Ruby had seen in the central event of the saga of Lucie Aubrac, her role in the escape of her husband from the Germans, ‘a chase worthy of an American film’,12 but it was the French director Berri who made a big-budget adaptation of Ils partiront dans l’ivresse.13 Historians had welcomed Ils partiront dans l’ivresse for presenting the private world and concerns of a prominent female resister.14 However, they criticized Berri’s Lucie Aubrac either for failing to portray resisters as individuals—or for doing solely that. For François Bédarida, the Aubracs were ‘victims of a truly mediocre film that keeps all the clichés and caricatures of the resisters in making of them walk-ons without substance….’15 Oliver Wieviorka praised Berri’s Lucie Aubrac for its depiction of resisters as three-dimensional figures, but condemned the film for offering the audience little understanding of why individuals would resist, what actions resisters undertook, and the conflicts among internal French resistance groups and between London and the internal resistance.16 When Lucie Aubrac published her memoir, historians had valued it because she depicted a personal experience of the Resistance difficult for them to access. But they demanded that when filmed, her story be placed in an historical context.17 Historians criticized Berri for taking the personal world of a resister as his sole

12

Marcel Ruby, La Résistance à Lyon, 2 vols. (Lyon: Éditions Hermès, 1979), 2:725. Josée Yanne had earlier directed a less widely publicized film of the Aubracs’ wartime story, Boulevard des Hirondelles (1991). 14 See, for instance, Jean-Pierre Rioux's review in Le Monde, 5 October 1984; Jean-Pierre Azéma, `Hommes et lieux de la Résistance’, in François Bédarida, ed., Résistants et collaborateurs: les Français dans les années noires (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 24; and Dominique Veillon, ‘Résister au féminine’, Pénélope 12 (Spring 1985): 87-92. 15 Libération, 12-13 July 1997 (François Bédarida). For another ambivalent comparison of Melville’s and Berri’s films, and the portrayal of Lucie Aubrac in each, see Dominique Veillon, ‘Les femmes dans la guerre: anonymes et résistantes’, in 1939-1945: combats de femmes, ed. Évelyne Morin-Rotureau (Paris: Autrement, 2001), 80. 16 Laurent Neumann, ‘La Résistance ordinaire de Lucie Aubrac’, L’Histoire 208 (March 1997): 6-7 [interview with Olivier Wieviorka]. François Delpla gets to the heart of the issue, criticizing the Lucie Aubrac of Berri’s Lucie Aubrac for having the traits of a secret agent: ‘It is only in films that one meets this kind of hero. The impulsive side of Lucie, her mood swings and the shifts in her morale disappear in favor of a superhuman character’. Aubrac: les faits et la calomnie (Paris: Le Temps des Cérises, 1997), 23. 17 The faux naïf quality of Ils partiront dans l’ivresse made it appealing to a general public and difficult for historians to analyze critically. Pierre Gamarra asks ‘Can the power of the authentic make up for a relative absence of style [d’écriture] or of literary professionalism?’ and responds that this is at the core of the success of Ils partiront dans l’ivresse. Review of Ils partiront dans l’ivresse in Europe 669-670 (January-February 1985): 172. 13

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subject, because they believed that a director presenting the Resistance to a mass audience took on pedagogical responsibilities.18 And, in turn, historians interpreted Lucie Aubrac’s decision to allow Berri to film her memoir as entailing new obligations and commitments. In an interview published at the time of the film’s release, Lucie Aubrac recalled that she had irritated de Gaulle at the prefecture at Le Mans in August 1944, telling him, `You will need to be careful, General, you risk becoming a star!’19 This issue of becoming a star, whose name would evoke the Resistance, was at the heart of historians’ reaction to the film Lucie Aubrac. It is through personalized individual narratives that collectivities outside an experience, like later generations, identify with an experience like the Resistance, but it is such identification that the historians questioned. Articles published at the time of the film’s release made clear that Lucie Aubrac had opposed Berri’s desire to give her name to his film for fear that she would be seen as making her individual story stand in for the Resistance. Le Nouvel observateur quoted her as telling Berri in response to his angry fit over this issue that she had survived the Gestapo and Barbie, and she was not impressed. `We negotiated’, she explained, using the same verb she used to describe her transactions with the Germans during the war, and agreed to allow her name to be used in exchange for a substantial gift to the Fondation Mémoire et Espoir, an organization dedicated to preserving and disseminating memory of the Resistance.20 Prominent academic historians saw Lucie Aubrac’s decision to allow her name and story to be used as a decision with consequences. Bédarida believed that Gérard Chauvy's Aubrac Lyon 1943, an attempt to debunk the Aubracs’ story published at the time of the film’s release, would never have drawn such attention if the widely-publicized film had not ‘consecrated the Aubrac couple as the eponymous heroes of the Resistance’. He contended that those who allowed themselves to personify the Resistance needed to be subjected to close scrutiny to 18

The Centre national de documentation pédagogique prepared materials to help lycée professors who wanted to teach Lucie Aubrac. Many took their classes to see the film. Libération, 26 February 1997. See also Alain Coustaury, ‘De l’utilisation pédagogique du film “Lucie Aubrac”’, Historiens & Géographes 359 (October-November 1997): 4547. 19 Lucie Aubrac, Cette exigeante liberté. Entretiens avec Corinne Bouchoux (Paris: l’Archipel, 1997), 148. 20 Le Nouvel observateur, 20-26 February 1997, 56. Lucie Aubrac explained that she had not been afraid to see Klaus Barbie: ‘No, I was going to negotiate’. L’Humanité, 22 February 1997. Éric Conan suggested that Berri seemed to feel that his contribution to the Fondation gave him permission to make ‘gross historical errors’ in the film. L’Express, 27 February 1997, 102. After the film’s release, Lucie Aubrac lamented, ‘I was taken in by this film. I didn’t think it was going to make such a scandal’. Libération, 7-8 February 1998.

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prevent them from overshadowing the true history of the resisters.21 For Henry Rousso, Berri's Lucie Aubrac produced ‘confusion’ between a heroine and a star. The hero has no accounts to render to anyone. He is free before History. He is the founder, with one foot in the symbolic register (the indiscutable exemplarity of his acts and his words), the other in the imaginary (the identification this permits). On the contrary, the star is subject to the duty of transparence, to the desire of a fickle and unfaithful public. He is completely in the register of the 22 imaginary, of illusion [fantasme] even.

Olivier Wieviorka criticized the Aubracs for giving their support to ‘an offensive media circus’ surrounding the film: ‘the process of making stars of the Aubracs appears quite out of place when one takes into account the stakes of the Resistance’.23 In Éloge de l’amour, Godard adapted struggles over who would present the resisters’ story, both the struggle between academic history and the community of resisters, and that between historians and resisters on the one hand and the mass media on the other. Memory of the Resistance in Éloge de l’amour is wrenched from rootedness in daily life, represented in the film by plaques in Paris honoring those who died during liberation of the city, and from national mass culture, by becoming a story that can be expropriated and owned by foreigners. In the second part of Éloge de l’amour, American representatives of Steven Spielberg come to see the Bayard couple, Jean and Françoise, to complete the purchase of film rights to their story. The Bayards need the money and cannot back out of the deal. Françoise quotes (without acknowledgement) Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie: ‘For four years in the organized resistance money fell to the level of a means. It was no longer an end’.24 Such days are over. Release of Berri’s Lucie Aubrac helped precipitate a confrontation between historians and the Resistance community of memory over the trustworthiness of the Aubracs’ individual memories, emblematic of the fate of memory of the Resistance in the obsessive phase of the Vichy Syndrome. In response, Raymond Aubrac asked for a roundtable at which historians could pose questions à l’américaine25, but Spielberg poses a different threat to the memory of the Resistance. For Godard, the United States has no ‘memory of its own’—inhabitants call themselves Americans because they have no particular 21

Liberation, 12-13 July 1997 (François Bédarida). Libération, 11 July 1997 (Henry Rousso). 23 Libération, 26 February 1997 (Olivier Wieviorka). 24 Godard, Éloge de l’amour, 113. The year after the release of Éloge de l’amour, Godard cited this line again, this time with acknowledgement to d’Astier de la Vigerie. Libération, 6-7 April 2002. 25 Henry Rousso, La Hantise du passé (Paris: Textuel, 1998), 131. 22

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name like citizens of other nations of North and South America—and are hungry for the memories of others, ‘especially of those who have resisted’.26 Certainly during the Cold War, the cultural imagination of the United States drew extensively from representations of the French Resistance to portray the resistance some envisaged to a Soviet invasion and others performed against the Vietnam War.27 The globalizing American impresario has no interest in challenging the historical accuracy of resisters’ memories. But by treating these memories as a market commodity, Spielberg would wrest them both from individual resisters and from their national community of memory.28 That the quintessential voice of American culture, Steven Spielberg, would move from the story of Schindler to that of the Bayards is simply an illustration for Godard of the fact that Americans have to buy the memory of others, a raw material which it processes and sells back as mass culture.29 William Styron, white novelist who made the African-American saga of Nat Turner’s resistance into a novel for a primarily white American audience, will write the screenplay for the Bayards’ story.30 26

Godard, Éloge de l’amour, 66. For a recent cinematic invocation of the French resister as guide for North Americans who seek to resist totalitarian currents in their own society, fighting under the banner, `Vive la Resistance’, see Trey Parker’s South Park. Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). Christophe, the embodiment of the American representation of the French resister, dies in the effort, singing, ‘Though I die, the Resistance lives on’. And in November 2003, the Los Angeles Times ordered its reporters to stop describing those combating American occupation forces in Iraq as `resistance fighters’, on the grounds that this term evoked, for Americans, the French Resistance and the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. Washington Post, 5 November 2003. 28 The American desire to reenact the role of Schindler, and then that of resisters, is an element of American fascination with the Vichy Syndrome, whose roots lie in the United States’ flirtation during the war with the Vichy regime and its initial embrace of alternatives to de Gaulle. The United States’ uneasy relationship with Fifth Republic France, the nation in Western Europe most likely to buck American diplomatic leadership, has fed the American sense that France refuses to confront its wartime past and accept fully the implications of the United States-led victory in World War II and the Cold War. 29 Foreign mass culture entrepreneurs, who would take the memory of the Resistance from the French, are the complement to foreign historians who gave to the French the history of the Occupation the French had avoided. These historians include the American Robert Paxton, the Canadian Michael Marrus, the German Eberhard Jäckel, the Israeli Zeev Sternhell, and the Swiss Philippe Burrin. 30 Juliette Binoche, star of the 1996 film about memory and World War II, The English Patient, is to play Françoise in the Spielberg film. Binoche had been Berri’s choice to play Lucie Aubrac, but he replaced her with Carole Bouquet after he began shooting the film. 27

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A state department official, Sumner Wells Junior, takes the lead in explaining en américain to the Bayards that `Washington is the real director of the ship and Hollywood only the stewart [sic]. Trade follows films’.31 Éloge de l’amour is Godard’s act of resistance to a Hollywoodization of the world, an act rooted in the contradictions of contemporary French responses to the Resistance (including the Franco-Swiss Godard’s own response). Memory of the Resistance is both inspiring and oppressive, leading to dramas of selfrepresentation as resisters, and efforts to resist the Resistance myth as well as to resist its appropriation by others. Godard had not been a resister and could never direct ‘a nostalgic pilgrimage to an epic that profoundly marked my generation’, what the resister Melville called his L’Armée des ombres,32 in the way Melville had done. Godard could not be the director Melville was and identified as a resister of another sort. Born in 1930, Godard explained that he came to feel `as a culpability’ his wartime `innocent adolescence’: Little by little, I set myself to looking, to digging up material that resisted… When we began to write, we spoke also, without political connotations, of the cinema of resistance. For us, for example, the American B movie had something of the liberator with respect to collaborators with the system.33

The United States was at the heart of social and political thought in postwar France, precisely because France’s relationship with the United States was far more complicated and all-encompassing than relations with Germany or the Soviet Union. Éloge de l’amour is a recent chapter in the Resistance narrative as a way of thinking relations with the United States. A look at the Aubracs’ lives before, during and after the war reveals the constant interplay and reference to the United States of individuals who define themselves as resisters. Lucie Bernard received a fellowship to go to the United States in September 1939 to pursue her doctoral research in American history. In preparation, she met Raymond Samuel, who had received a M.S. from M.I.T. and set up a patent law office for a French firm in Washington. He had come back to France to do his military service, but was planning to return to the United States. Lucie Bernard and Raymond Samuel fell in love and married in December 1939. 31

Godard, Éloge de l’amour, 90. In other words, Orson follows Sumner. Sumner Welles was one of the architects of the postwar world in the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Embodiment of an earlier age of United States culture, he was fluent in French and would not have spoken en américain. There was no Sumner Welles Junior. Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 32 Rui Noguelra, Le Cinéma selon Melville (Paris: Seghers, 1973), 202. 33 Jean-Claude Loiseau and Jacques Morice, ‘“Je reviens en arrière mais je vais de l’avant”’ [interview with Godard], Télérama 2679 (16 May 2001): 54.

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The pair decided not to use their visas to go to the United States, but to stay to defend their personal and national community. For Godard, the question is whether the Bayards’ story should go where the Aubracs chose not to go in 1940. Evidence of support by Libération-Sud and other internal Resistance movements was crucial to de Gaulle in eventually securing American acceptance of his authority. D'Astier de la Vigerie, commissaire à l'Intérieur, made Lucie Aubrac responsible for informing journalists in London about the Resistance.34 Maurice Schumann, charged by de Gaulle in June 1944 with generating press coverage favorable to Free French, rather than AngloAmerican, administration of liberated territories in France, found his best argument was to point to the interior Resistance in France as evidence that the French repudiated the Vichy regime and collaboration. One story that clinched his case was the liberation of Raymond Aubrac and his fellow prisoners by Lucie Aubrac’s groupe franc.35 The Aubracs’ story became in turn the subject of an American comic book immediately after the war.36 The Americans bought the Aubracs’ story long before Godard suggested they wanted to buy the memory. At Liberation, the Aubracs played an active role in France in efforts to assure that the Free French administered liberated territories in France. Spielberg’s Private Ryan evokes the United States’ leading role in the liberation of France, but the American memory has no place for the second liberation of France from the threat of American occupation. D’Astier de la Vigerie sent Lucie Aubrac to western France in July 1944 and charged her with seeking to

34

See, for instance, ‘Women of France. Brave Parts Played by Resisters’, The Times, 24 March 1944. 35 L’Humanité, 18 April 1987. See the celebratory account in George Creel, ‘The Heroes: Lucie Aubrac’, Collier’s, 18 November 1944, 76. Those today who see Lucie Aubrac’s story as emblematic of a mythification of the Resistance, and critique of her story as essential to its demythification, often ignore that what they see as the mythification began as part of the wartime effort. 36 ‘Lucie to the Rescue’, True Comics 49 (May-June 1946). Lucie Aubrac reports that when she first read a comic book from the United States in 1938, she asked, `Will we have to accept this way of reading? This way in which style counts for so little!’ Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 68. But, a half-century later, Guylaine Guidez would contend, `Those who best understood [Lucie Aubrac] are the Americans who choose the comic book to tell her adventures, for there is with this great resister a comic insolence that evokes les Pieds Nickelés’. Femmes dans la guerre 1939-1945 (Paris: Perrin, 1989), 159. The Americans made Lucie Aubrac their own in (for her) the distinctly American genre she initially rejected.

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assure that French officials, not Americans, governed liberated territories.37 In her preface to the translation of the American historian Margaret Collin’s Weitz’s Sisters in the Resistance, a study of women in the French Resistance, Lucie Aubrac called it a book to give as an antidote to those who delight in sordid images of women whose heads were shaved for having sexual relations with the occupying Germans or, in a significant pairing, obscene [grivoises] photos like that of a French woman kissing an American soldier à pleine bouche.38 In August 1944 de Gaulle appointed Raymond Aubrac commissaire régional de la république for six departments in Marseilles. Fearful that the Americans and British saw their mission as governing a conquered territory, de Gaulle spent twenty-five minutes of his half-hour conversation with Aubrac telling him that his most important immediate mission was to prevent the installation of Anglo-American administration in the form of AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories).39 The Americans did not recognize the Free French Comité Français de Libération Nationale until October 1944 and refused to transport Aubrac when Allied troops landed; he was forced to take a French plane to St. Tropez.40 In the fall of 1944, Aubrac countered American moves to take control of production by requisitioning businesses in Marseilles compromised during the Occupation. Working with the resurgent Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), he introduced a form of employee management which helped jump-start production.41 After leaving government service, Aubrac co-founded a business firm in 1948 whose activities included negotiating commercial arrangements for Communist Czechoslovakia. One of Aubrac’s first projects was to try to effect the transfer of rolling mills which Czechoslovakia had bought earlier

37

Lucie Aubrac, ‘Un Témoignage’, in La France de 1945 (Caen: Université de Caen, 1996), 15. 38 Lucie Aubrac, `Préface’ to Margaret Collins Weitz, Les Combattantes de l’ombre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996), 11. 39 Intervention of Raymond Aubrac in Claire Andrieu, Lucette Le Van, and Antoine Prost, eds., Les Nationalisations de la Libération. De l’utopie au compromis (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1987), 109. 40 Raymond Aubrac, Où la mémoire s’attarde (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 125. 41 American authorities came to express satisfaction with Raymond Aubrac’s governance of the explosive situation in Marseilles. François Bédarida, `Les Alliés et le pouvoir’, in Philippe Buton and J.-M. Guillon, eds., Les Pouvoirs en France à la Libération (Paris: Belin, 1994), 72. Hilary Footitt and John Simmonds, France 1943-1945 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 101-102.

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from the United States, but whose move the United States blocked after the Communists took power.42 Lucie Aubrac believes that Klaus Barbie, Gestapo officer during the war in Lyon who was protected by the Americans after the war, gave the United States her name as a Communist and for this reason she was denied entry to the United States after the war.43 However, it was precisely the pre-Cold War Resistance world in which Communists and non-Communists could cooperate, on which the United States would later draw. As commissaire at the end of the war, Raymond Aubrac had earned Ho Chi Minh’s respect for his intervention to stop the abuse of Indochinese workers in Marseilles. Ho Chi Minh chose to live with the Aubracs in Paris during the failed negotiations with the French over the future of Indochina in 1946 (and became godfather of their daughter born then). In the American phase of the Indochinese War, the United States recognized Aubrac’s special position. In 1967 it pursued the peace initiative of the international scientists’ group, Pugwash, using Raymond Aubrac as a conduit to bring an American peace proposal directly to Ho Chi Minh in what Robert McNamara termed the Americans' ‘most intense diplomatic initiative with Hanoi’.44 Although the Pugwash initiative failed, Aubrac continued to play an active role in diplomacy to end the war in Indochina. McNamara later complimented Aubrac’s acuity, reporting that after the Tet offensive Aubrac ‘helped pave the way’ for the meeting 42 Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 200-203; Karel Bartosek, Les Aveux des archives (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 118-129. 43 Bourgault and Thiébault, ‘Lucie et Raymond Aubrac’, 12. Barbie’s lawyer, Jacques Vergès, embroidered the story, claiming that in exchange for protection his client provided the Americans with information on ‘the behavior of certain “heroes” of the Resistance, heroes in appearance, arrested by the Germans and liberated after betrayals that remained secret. That is to say that the United States “held”, thanks to Barbie, a certain number of individuals deemed in France to be antifascists and on the left. This was an attractive marriage dowry for the Americans’. Le Salaud lumineux (Paris: Editions No. 1/Michel Lafon, 1990), 292. Inhabiting the liminal world between East and West, the Aubracs experienced Cold War harassment from Communists as well. They lived in Prague at the time of the Slansky Affair—where Vergès also lived in the early 1950s, organizing anti-colonial students). French president Vincent Auriol reported that the Communists suspected Raymond Aubrac of having some sort of relationship with the Americans and, although he was not a party member, Aubrac was demoted in the French Communist Party’s anti-semitic housecleaning. Vincent Auriol, Journal du septennat 1947-1954 7 vols. (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), 7:36-7; Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 203; Bartosek, Les Aveux, 129. 44 See William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994), Part IV, 776-793. Robert S. McNamara et. al., Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 292.

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of American and Vietnamese representatives in Paris in March 1968.45 Between 1969 and 1972, Aubrac met Henry Kissinger twelve to fifteen times, conveyed Kissinger's messages to the Vietnamese delegation in Paris, and brought their responses back to Kissinger.46 During the Vietnam War, the Americans needed not Raymond Aubrac’s story, but what his story allowed him to do. 47 What is the memory Spielberg buys in Éloge de l’amour? It is a memory of betrayal, the polar opposite of the story Berri brought to the screen of Lucie Aubrac dramatically rescuing her husband from the Germans. Absent from Berri’s film is Barbie’s specious deathbed recovered memory of having been tipped off by Lucie Aubrac about the meeting at Caluire where Jean Moulin was arrested—recovered after forty years of silence with the aid of his lawyer Jacques Vergès playing therapist. But in Godard’s resisters’ story, Jean Bayard was instructed by British Intelligence to work for the Gestapo; this led to many deaths. Following orders, he betrayed Françoise, who was arrested and deported to Ravensbrück. When she returned, Jean and Françoise married. Jean Bayard was tried and acquitted twice (like René Hardy, the resister whose betrayal is widely assumed to lie behind the arrest of Raymond Aubrac and Jean Moulin—and who is so identified in Berri’s Lucie Aubrac.48) After the war, 45 McNamara, et. al., Argument Without End, 292-301, 308-309. Robert McNamara, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books, 1995), 295-296. McNamara now criticizes the United States for using Aubrac solely as a courier and not asking him for his thoughts on negotiating with the North Vietnamese. Argument Without End, 382. The American diplomat Chester Cooper found Raymond Aubrac ‘to be a practical man with a shrewd sense of politics’. The Lost Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1970), 378. 46 After the war, Aubrac convinced McNamara to use his influence to get the United States to send maps of mines it had laid in Vietnam to the Vietnamese so they could remove them. Aubrac, Où la mémoire, 175, 333-334. 47 In his memoirs, Raymond Aubrac evokes his sympathy for Hanoi in Gallophile rather than philoCommunist terms. No longer a colony, Vietnam was pursuing a nationalist struggle against American domination with which Aubrac could identity. For him, Hanoi had the characteristics of a provincial French town. Many Vietnamese Communist leaders, in turn, told him of their warm memories of France. Aubrac felt `the American aggression as a personal attack’. Ibid., 270. 48 Godard’s Spielberg film would not be the first American film born of sagas of Resistance betrayal. Columbia bought the rights to Amère Victoire, René Hardy’s novel of a combatant who feared his moment of weakness would be revealed. Hardy collaborated on the screenplay for Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957), which starred Richard Burton. ‘I do not think that unionized, patented heroes [les héros syndiqués et patentés] will like Bitter Victory’, Ray said; ‘only true heros will like it’. Charles Bitsch, ‘Entretien avec Nicholas Ray’, Cahiers du cinéma 89 (November 1958): 14. Godard, resisting in the 1950s by championing American films, had none of the concerns about

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Jean Bayard remained a Communist and was accused of working for the Soviets—a charge not unlike those recently made against Moulin of having been a Soviet agent during the war and against Raymond Aubrac of having served as a conduit after the war for funds sent from Communist Czechoslovakia to the French Communist Party.49 Godard’s presentation of both anti-semitism and the Resistance incorporates memories of betrayal and betrayal in their remembrance. Éloge de l’amour returns obsessively to collective and personal betrayal of Jews during the war—and now.50 The central figure in the film is the composer and filmmaker Edgar, godchild of the daughter of Antoinette Sachs, Jean Moulin’s love. Éloge de l’amour opens with Edgar discussing a scene from his film with an actress. A young woman has sewn a yellow star on her jacket to please her boyfriend. While he is off making a phone call, a band of men come along, see the yellow star, and tell her that if she wants to see some fascists, there they are—and they beat her senseless. Edgar’s grandfather was rounded up in a rafle in 1942. Early in Éloge de l’amour, his grandfather’s partner’s son Rosenthal is seen negotiating the return of art works taken from Jews during the war, a complement to negotiation of the departure of the Bayards’ wartime story. Rosenthal finances Edgar’s film and when Edgar drifts from him in what appears an act of betrayal, his benefactor `loses the memory’.51 At one point, Edgar asked an auditioning actress to read a poem by Robert Brasillach, the intellectual collaborator (and historian of the cinema) tried and executed in 1945. Disappointed with her effort, Edgar sadistically inflicts a performance of the poem on her. The longest presentation of another’s art in the film is that of Brasillach, the anti-semitic golden boy of the French extreme right today—and the counter-memory of the obsessions of the Vichy Syndrome. A little later, an honorarium is paid in part in kind [`en nature’]: the services of a prostitute, `a Jewess as only Raphaël knew who to draw them’. 52

Ray’s film about the Resistance that he would have four decades later about his imagined Spielberg film on the subject. Bitter Victory ‘was not cinema, it was better than cinema’, wrote Godard. ‘Like the sun [Bitter Victory] makes you close your eyes. The truth blinds’. Jean-Luc Godard, `Au-delà des étoiles’, Cahiers du Cinéma 79 (January 1958): 44-45. 49 Thierry Wolton, Le Grand Recrutement (Paris: Grasset, 1993). Bartosek, Les Aveux. 50 Drancy was the site of the major transit camp for deportation of Jews from France to extermination camps, beginning in 1942. Godard lingers on the train sign `Drancy-Avenir’, and asks ‘who had the brilliant idea of speaking of the future (avenir) at Drancy’? Godard, Éloge de l’amour, 68. Arnaud des Pallières’ 1996 film Drancy-Avenir addresses a later generation’s confrontation with the wartime deportation of French Jews. 51 Ibid., 73. 52 Ibid., 58.

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When Edgar meets Françoise, Jean and their granddaughter (and historian Jean Lacouture’s godchild) Berthe, he is researching Catholic participation in the Resistance and writing a cantata for Simone Weil, a Jew attracted to Catholicism— and known for her criticism of Judaism. At Ravensbrück Françoise herself had ‘made her own the Catholic faith’.53 Near the film’s end, Berthe asks her grandmother the question she has never dared asked her grandparents before: why did they never use the name ‘Samuel’ again after the war. Samuel is the name Berthe uses and that her father, the resisters’ son, used. Berthe’s question evokes painful issues of identity and memory of Jews and deported resisters during the war.54 William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice, novel and blockbuster film about a Catholic woman at Auschwitz living with the legacy of betrayal, would appear to be a good choice to write the script for Spielberg’s film about Jean and Françoise. The Resistance is still a living memory in France which aging resisters want to pass on. Resisters had sworn they would not be like the preceding generation of anciens combattants. The First World War veterans with whom resisters grew up made clear that no one could do what they had done and all should be indebted to them. Nor could they communicate their experience to those who had not been there. Resisters like the Aubracs see their experience as unique, but they believe the Resistance is something that can and must be passed on.55 ‘My father’, explained Lucie Aubrac, ‘was a veteran [un ancien combatant]. Me, I am not a veteran resister [une ancienne résistante], I am a resister. It is a temperament [un état d’esprit], the Resistance. It is a way of thinking that cannot be bygone [ancienne]’.56 With Barbie's extradition to stand

53

Ibid., 113. The decision of Jewish resisters like Raymond Samuel to take their Resistance name after the war could be read as the ultimate act of assimilation consonant with the emancipation of Jews in the French Revolution: putting aside a public Jewish identity in favor of a French identity, enacted in the Resistance, the one place in wartime France that accepted Jews as French. See Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide. Entre le mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), 361-368. In contemporary France, anti-semitic publications make references to ‘Raymond Aubrac (his true name Raymond Samuel)’. Eric Laffitte, `Aubrac et London débusqués’, Minute, 13 November 1996, 3. For the Holocaust-denying Bulletin de la Vieille Taupe (1998), `Raymond (Samuel) was part of the nebulous and the influential occult Judeo-Stalinian leadership whose role is barely beginning to be unveiled’. http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/archVT/bullVT/bullVT6.html (accessed 16 January 2007). 55 ‘We are not, we will never be anciens combattants’, d’Astier wrote in 1945. Tuquoi, Emmanuel d’Astier, 209. See also Daniel Cordier, ‘Questions à l’histoire orale’, Cahiers de l’IHTP. 4 (1987): 74. 56 Isabelle Juppé, De mémoire de grand-mères. Le XXe siècle raconté par celles qui l’ont fait (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1995), 232-233. See also Lucie Aubrac in `Table 54

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trial in France almost forty years after the end of the war, Lucie Aubrac explained, ‘Our veterans’ stories [d’anciens combattants] no longer interest anyone. Young people have the impression that we are talking drivel. The trial of Klaus Barbie— and, I hope, live on television—should allow our grandchildren to live day by day a history lesson. This would be incredibly instructive’. And `day by day a history lesson’ was the basis of Ils partiront dans l'ivresse, written as a diary in the present tense, not as a retrospective autobiography.57 Lucie Aubrac feared that the age of both Barbie and resisters like the Aubracs in the 1980s would obscure for young adults that Gestapo officers and resisters made ethical choices to torture and to resist at their age. 58 ‘The verb “to resist” must always be conjugated in the present’, Lucie Aubrac told an interviewer in 1996.59 The very distance from the past championed in discourses on historical objectivity troubled Lucie Aubrac. For both Godard and the Aubracs, the Occupation and the Resistance lead to the generation of the grandchildren. Edgar’s parents committed suicide when he was a child. And it is Edgar’s search for the adult stage of love which stymies his film production. The resister Jean Bayard recognizes: Fundamentally, the resistance had a youth, it had an old age, but it has never had an adult age. Who is going to decide if your past is alive or not? This depends on what you think of yourself. Someone who has the project of going further defines his old self as a self that no longer exists. On the other hand, the project of some implies a refusal of the passage of time. They have a tight solidarity with the past. The majority of the elderly are in this situation. They refuse the passage of time because they do not want to decline [déchoir]. Each holds the belief that they remain unchanged, but to what extent does memory allow us to recuperate our lives?... In ’45 we believed that it was beginning. In fact, it was ending and I discovered that it took fifty years for it to really end. In fact, it happens over the parents and ends up with the grand-children.60

Berthe works in a law office and reviews the contract for her grandparents. She thinks they have been taken and is hostile to what she sees as a betrayal of their ronde’, in François Marcot, ed., La Résistance et les Français: lutte armée et maquis (Besançon: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté, 1996), 485. 57 The effet de réel which Denis Boak recognizes in Ils partiront dans l’ivresse (Denis Boak, ‘Two Courageous Women Resistance Writers: Aubrac and Friang’, Essays in French Literature 31 (1994): 50) is precisely what attracted historians to the work at first and made them so suspicious of it later (instead of interpreting this effet de réel as a sign that Aubrac’s memoir requires another reading than works saturated with the effet de réel conveyed by archives). 58 Ania Francos, `Lucie Aubrac: “il ne faut pas refouler l'histoire”’, Le Nouvel observateur, 11 February 1983, 26. 59 Le Monde, 9 November 1996. 60 Godard, Éloge de l’amour, 91-92, 94.

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Resistance memory.61 But Berthe, who fascinates Edgar, is not sustained by the memory of the Resistance. She commits suicide. The year before release of Éloge de l’amour, Lucie Aubrac had published La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants, in a series of books intended for the author’s children (not grandchildren).62 She believes that the French who lived through the Occupation, whether resisters, collaborators or the disengaged, did not speak to their children about the war.63 She began La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants by explaining that children growing up in a prosperous `consumer society’ were not interested in their parents’ resistance, which they saw as alien to the problems they faced, but that grandchildren see its relevance in the world in which they live. In her account, the grandchildren appear willing to take up the challenge of keeping alive a memory tradition of resistance activism.64 Lucie Aubrac had written a history of the Resistance for her own generation in 1945, a memoir for her children’s generation, Ils partiront dans l’ivresse, in 1984, and a distilled memory tradition for her grandchildren in 2001. What was a challenge to the children can be a legacy to the grandchildren—and the treasured opportunity for grandchildren to rebel against their parents by identifying with their grandparents. In 1945, Lucie Aubrac the lycée professor had described the origins of Resistance in 1940 as the French acting ‘a little like the children before a severe teacher, it was a matter of tricking and mocking’; the French displayed their ‘rebellious spirit [esprit frondeur], happy to fool the temporary teacher [le maître momentané]’.65 If the myth of la France résistante after the war had suggested that most Frenchmen naturally chose to 61 Berthe questions her grandmother, ‘In all the films the young women must undress and take a tumble with their lovers. That was really it, the story of you and grandpa[?]’. Ibid., 100. For Olivier Wieviorka, ‘The dramas of the Occupation merited better, it seems to me, than the lewd outpourings [épanchements impudiques]’ of the actress Carole Bouquet, who portrays Lucie Aubrac. Libération, 26 February 1997. 62 Lucie Aubrac, La Résistance expliquée à mes petits-enfants (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 63 Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 18-19. 64 Irène Michine, `Lucie Aubrac [interview with Lucie Aubrac]’, Le Patriote résistant, February 2000. Yet resisters’ grandchildren need to be informed. At the trial to settle the defamation suit pursued by the Aubracs against Gérard Chauvy, Lucie Aubrac said of his Aubrac Lyon 1943, ‘A dishonest work. What will our nine grandchildren say?’ Libération, 7-8 February 1998. As the Resistance was made an historical event, resisters found that the living memory in which the decision (for them) to resist had been obvious, was being lost. Germaine Tillion remarked that ‘in 1989, they asked many times why I resisted. In 1945, no one ever asked me that question’. À la recherche du vrai et du juste (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 187 65 Lucie Aubrac, La Résistance (Naissance et organisation) (Paris: Robert Lang, 1945), 12, 15.

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resist, and the Vichy Syndrome which succeeded it that most Frenchmen naturally turned to Pétain, Lucie Aubrac’s goal was to make the Resistance a choice of the type confronted by members of every generation.66 She cannot accept Jean Bayard’s dirge that they thought it was starting in 1945, but it was ending. Godard’s insistent questioning of the Americans’ need for the memory of others cannot help but lead us to ask about his need for others’ history. The long conversation in Éloge de l’amour between Edgar and Jean Lacouture is revealing. Edgar, like Godard in search of the materials with which to make art, speaks at total cross-purposes with the biographer Lacouture about a variety of subjects.67 The Aubracs’ story is a narrative of loyalty at cross-purposes with that of the Bayards developed by Godard to be purchased by Spielberg: an individual tale of a wife whose rescue of her husband is an affirmation of her fidelity to the Resistance, not a saga of betrayal ordered by superiors; a collective affirmation of the Resistance narrative of fidelity vs. the Vichy Syndrome narrative of betrayal; and a life of resistance to American imperial pretensions, in contrast to the Bayards’ need to sell their story to the Americans. Godard is right. To think of something we need to think of something else. 66

For Lucie Aubrac, ‘It is false, as films, literature, and theses have suggested, that one became by chance a resister, milicien or gestapiste’. Francos, ‘Lucie Aubrac’, 26; Aubrac, La Résistance expliquée, 9. Lucie Aubrac seeks an audience of youth looking to the past for models to shape their future, not historians intent on confining resisters’ past to the past. Aubrac, La Résistance expliquée, 7. In sum, the Aubracs today are not `witnesses’ of past events, so much as individuals who `witness’ for the values of the Resistance. 67 Jean Lacouture plays himself in Éloge de l’amour. If Godard teasingly evokes the Aubracs, Lacouture is comfortably present in the film. Friend to aging resisters and guide to those who would study the Resistance, these are roles one senses that he would like to play. As a biographer, Lacouture has fashioned narratives of the sort needed to sustain the Resistance as a living memory. He has not pardoned himself for his failure to engage in the Resistance until late in the war. Profession biographe (Paris: Hachette, 2003), 33. Lacouture wrote with deep admiration of the Aubracs’ decision to resist in 1940: `What always stupefied me, in the story of Lucie (and of Raymond, of course) is the obviousness of their entry into the struggle. You have to have known France in June 1940… to be able to assess that this simple and immediate determination carried in it something extravagant’. Why did Klaus Barbie turn away Lucie Aubrac? ‘Absolutely depraved himself, he sniffed out in her an incorruptible purity. He was defeated from the beginning. Out!’ And after the war Lucie Aubrac continued to appear to Lacouture as endowed with the ‘face of a white eagle and the voice of the witness of the Last Judgment’. Jean Lacouture, ‘Lucie-la-lumière’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 20-26 February 1997, 56. Raymond Aubrac is the answer Lacouture provides to the question he poses, ‘If Joan of Arc had survived, and married, what kind of sire would have been her spouse?’ Jean Lacouture, ‘Histoire d’un Juste’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 5 September 1996, 63.