Are You More French Than Him?

‘Are you more French than him?’

France in Crisis: 1934-1944

Part Two

HIH 3316

Course convenor: Dr. Chris Millington

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Office hours: Tues. 12-1pm; Wed. 11-12pm in JC 104

Course outline

w/c 28th JanIntroduction to the course
w/c 4th FebVichy in History
w/c 11th FebThe Nature of the Vichy Regime
w/c 18th FebCollaboration and Resistance I
w/c 25th FebThe Resistance on film: L’armée du crime/ The

Army of Crime

w/c 4th MarCollaboration and Resistance II
w/c 11th MarFrance and the Final Solution
w/c 18th MarFrance and the Jews on film: La rafle / The Round

[assignment due 20th March]

w/c 15th AprLiberation and Purge
w/c 22 Apr Vichy on Trial
w/c 29 AprREVISION

CONTACT

You may contact me at .

You may visit me during my office hours – Tuesday 12-1pm and Wednesday 11-12pm.

If you are absent from a class, or know that you are going to be absent, please contact me as soon as possible by email. Absence will be monitored in line with school policy.

Assessment

This course is assessed through 1 x 2500 essay [50%] and 1 x 2 hour examination [50%] (comprising one essay and two source analyses).

Part One : Essay

Answer ONE of the following questions. The word limit is 2500 word. Two marks will be deducted for going over this limit – this is the department’s policy.

‘In France, since the end of the Second World War, political positions and attitudes under the Occupation have been presented in such a way as to render untenable a straightforward pro-Resistance reading of the war years (Margaret Atack). Discuss.
Was Vichy fascist?
Compare the roles of women in the Resistance and in the Vichy regime.
What explains collaboration? Discuss with reference to both the Vichy regime and the Paris-based collaborationists.
‘...it must be remembered that historians are no better placed to judge than any other citizen. The special skill of the historian resides in understanding, not the conducting of trials’ (Kevin Passmore). Discuss, with reference to one or more of the post-war trials of French collaborators.

The DEADLINE for this essay is Wednesday 20th March between 1pm and 4pm.

Part Two – Examination

Date to be announced. See sample exam paper at the end of this guide.

General reading

You are not required to buy these books, but if you decide to do so, it’s worth checking This site sells used books and I have used it many times.

A veritable encyclopedia of Vichy France:

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-44 (Oxford, 2001) [ebook in library]

The book that changed the history of Vichy forever:

Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 (NY: Columbia University Press, 1972), [one week]

Other works

There are many articles and books on wartime France. Use the bibliographies in this guide and do some research into the available literature in the library.

John F. Sweets, Choices in Vichy France (NY/London: OUP, 1994) [one week]

Sarah Fishman et al (eds.), France at War: Vichy and the Historians

Rod Kedward, La vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006)

Charles Sowerwine, France since 1870 (London: Palgrave, 2009).

[Both are in the library: Kedward [one week loan] ; Sowerwine, 2001 edition [normal loan]]

Maurice Larkin, France since the Popular Front (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988) [one week loan]

James McMillan, Twentieth Century France: Politics and Society, 1898-1991 (New York: Edward Arnold, 1992) [one week loan]

Maurice Agulhon, The French Republic: 1879-1992 (London: Wiley Blackwell, 1995) [normal loan]

James McMillan, (ed) Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) [one week loan]

Herman Lebovics, True France: The Wars Over Cultural Identity, 1900-1945 (London: Cornell UP, 1992) [normal loan]

Kenneth Mouré (ed.) Crisis and Renewal 1918-1962 (New York: Berghahn, 2002) [normal loan]

Richard Vinen, France, 1934-1970 (London: Macmillan, 1996) normal and [one week loan]

Martin Alexander (ed.), French History since Napoleon, (London: Arnold, 1999). [normal loan]

Class 1: Introduction to the course

In this class, I will give you information about the course, readings, assessment, etc. There is no need to prepare anything.

Class 2: Vichy in History

Context (optional)

EITHER Rod Kedward, La vie en Blue: France and the French since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006), chapters 11 and 12 on collaboration and resistance [Short Loan] OR Charles Sowerwine, France Since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) [Short Loan] Chapters 14 and 15 on Vichy and the resistance

Essential reading

- Kim Munholland, ‘Review article: Wartime France: Remembering Vichy’, French Historical Studies, 18, 3, Spring 1994, 801-820. [online]

- Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, introduction [ebook]

- Nicholas Atkin, The French at War, 1934-1944, pp. 1-13.

- Moshik Temkin, ‘Avec un certain malaise: The Paxtonian trauma in France 1973-1974’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38 (2003).

Review of Army of Crime by Philip French, The Observer, 4 October 2009

This morally engaging tale is one of the most important revisionist accounts of life under

The second world war was scarcely over when René Clément embarked on the first French movie about life under German Occupation, La Bataille du Rail, a celebration of courageous railwaymen working with the Resistance. The films that followed over the next 25 years also presented a largely unified nation defying the occupying power, most notably the Gaullist Jean-Pierre Melville's masterly, downbeat Army of Shadows (1969) about the Resistance movement, the third movie in his trilogy on the Occupation. But in 1971 Marcel Ophuls's four-and-a-half-hour documentary The Sorrow and the Pity told a very different story of a deeply divided country, many of whose citizens happily collaborated with the Germans, informed on their neighbours and connived in the deportation of Jews. Originally commissioned for TV, it was banned from transmission in France but enjoyed a long run in the Paris cinemas. Then Louis Malle, whose own company had undertaken the exhibition of The Sorrow and the Pity, made Lacombe Lucien (1974), a feature film centring on a simple-minded country boy who, having been rejected by the Maquis, throws in his hand with the local auxiliaries working with the Gestapo, betrays his old schoolteacher (who works for the Resistance) and sets about exploiting a fugitive Jewish tailor and his daughter. Lucien is not presented as a monster but as a fairly average Frenchman.

Since Ophuls and Malle shattered the silence and broke up the moral logjam, a considerable body of honest, complex interrogative films has appeared, and in the run-up to the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the second world war there's been a wave of revisionist accounts of life under German occupation not just in France but in Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belarus, Army of Crime (L'Armée du Crime) being one of the most important. It's directed and co-scripted by Robert Guédiguian, son of a German mother and an Armenian father, best known for his leftwing movies about working-class life in the Marseilles area, where he was born in 1953. Like Days of Glory, Rachid Bouchareb's film about the black people and Arabs recruited from France's African colonies to fight for La Patrie in the second world war, Guédiguian's film throws light on a neglected group who paid a high price for their patriotism. These are the anti-fascist refugees from Spain, Hungary, Poland, Armenia, Italy and other countries, most of them Jews and communists, who saw France as the cradle of freedom and played a significant role in the Resistance.

The film begins with a convoy of buses, their windows barred, passing through the bright, summery streets of Paris. The time is 1944, the passengers are prisoners on their way to be executed, and a voice on the soundtrack delivers a litany of names, each followed by the phrase "Mort pour La France". The narrative then begins in 1941 at the point when Germany invades the Soviet Union. The sundering of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact results in the simultaneous round-up of communists and a commitment to armed resistance by the Communist Party.

One of the film's focal figures, and certainly the most striking one, is Missak Manouchian (Simon Abkarian), a charismatic Armenian poet and factory worker, happily married to a Frenchwoman (Virginie Ledoyen). He's arrested as a suspected communist but released after denying his political affiliations and then recruited to be a leading member of the communist resistance group FTP-MOI.

The FTP stands for "Francs-tireurs et partisans", named after the irregular force from the 1870 Franco-Prussian War; the MOI ('Main-d'oeuvre immigrée') denotes that they're immigrant workers. Missak is initially opposed to violence but is persuaded of its necessity in opposing Nazism. As a child he lost most of his family in the Turkish massacres in Armenia, and he tells the people he gathers and trains: "Remember what Hitler said in 1936, 'No one remembers the Armenians now'."

He persuades the hot-headed teenagers around him to abandon their activities as freelance assassins and bombers, and soon his team becomes the deadliest, best organised anti-Nazi force in Paris, though a heavy price is paid in the deaths of hostages. Their victims are Germans, but the people who pursue the FTP-MOI are almost entirely French – regular police and auxiliaries eager to please and impress their Nazi masters and the Gestapo. The gang is ultimately betrayed by a vindictive concierge, a Jewish girl vainly seeking to help her incarcerated parents, and – the very embodiment of evil banality – a weaselly middle-aged police inspector from the 11th arrondissement, the poor area where many of the foreign immigrants live.