19. Resistance

Professor John Merriman:
Okay, I want to just finish off, because trying to do the
collaboration in one week is not easy.
I want to talk a little bit more about Vichy and the Jews,
and then mention something about Franois
Mitterrand, the late president of France,
and the whole question of forgetting and then remembering;
and then I'll leap into resistance.
Just at the beginning, just to put the perspective of
how the French Vichy forces or our government's treatment of
the Jews compares to other countries,
that in November of 1942--that's a crucial period
because it's at that point that the Germans occupy the so-called
free zone or Vichy zone--and at that point Vichy authorities
hand over the Jews who had been imprisoned in the Vichy zone to
the Nazis. And they had marked their
ration cards--you had to have ration cards,
you had to have cards to get a little bit of butter and all
this kind of stuff--they marked them juif or
juive, selon le cas,
which means Jew, which made it easier for the
German or the French police to arrest them.
And, so, not only did they--they had to sort of turn
over what was left of their authority, but they did more
than they needed to do. And things were so bad for the
Jews at the hands of the Vichy police that when thousands of
foreign Jews had gone into Nice, had somehow gotten into Nice,
which Mussolini's fascist troops had occupied,
that they essentially arrested them or made it easier for the
people there to be identified and to be taken by the fascists.
And in October 1942, when the U.S.
Government proposed to take 1,000 Jewish kids whose parents
had been deported without them, Pierre Laval,
who would get his after the war, and Ren
Bousquet, who is the police head who was the one that was
murdered before his trial by a guy seeking publicity for his
book, they replied that only
certified orphans could be given exit visas, and thus because you
couldn't prove that the parents had already died in the death
camps, they would not allow the Jewish
children to be exiled, to be refugees in the United
States. And Laval and Bousquet,
both of whom were frenetic anti-Semites,
knew this very well.

So, essentially they just
condemned them to their fate and the children couldn't leave.
And more than five weeks following the Allied invasion of
Normandy, which as you know was on the 6th of June,
1944, the Vichy police were still arresting Jews,
and right up until the last, into the last days.
And so many of the cases of the miliciens,
people in the milice, who were gunned down at the
very end of the war during liberation had been--these were
people who had gone out of their way simply to keep on arresting
Jews and killing Jews when it was clear that the Allies were
going to come in and chase the Germans out.
In the eight months of 1944 before liberation almost 15,000
Jews were deported; and deported means to the death
camps. So, anyway, three-quarters of
all the Jews who were arrested in France during the entire
period were arrested by the French police.
French recteurs- -recteurs were the heads
of the academies, that is France is divided into
academies, that is the whole structure of
education from the universities down to the maternelle,
to kindergarten, the recteurs demissed
Jews from their post--and you met one of them,
Marc Bloch, whom I said lost his job twice;
he lost it in Strasbourg and then in Montpellier.
And in Marseilles the Order of Doctors purged Jews from the
right to practice and complained that there were still Jews in
medical school. Now, again they didn't have to
do this, the Germans weren't saying--they had other things,
security and things that they were worried about--"security"
in quotes--but it was just done because they wanted to do it.
And it's the same thing in the legal profession where lots of
magistrates, as in the case of Hitler's Germany,
in Weimar before Hitler came to power, the magistrates,
many of them, most of them,
had been trained under the Second Reich,
that is before World War I, and they flocked to the extreme
right very quickly. Public opinion in general did
not criticize measures taken against the Jews,
at least until 1942.

And as I said the other day,
there were so many denunciations of people that
were--notes that said "je suis sure que mon voisin il est
jui," I'm sure that my neighbor he's
a Jew. And the costs of this were
rather serious. So, what do we know about the
reactions of non-Jewish French men and women to what was going
on? Well, late in 1940 900,000
people visited an exposition that Vichy had put up in the
Petit Palais in Paris about the alleged links of Freemasons,
that is free thinkers, to Jews and to the British.
So, if you went into--this was just the equivalent--well,
it wasn't the artistic equivalent,
but it was rather like if you went to--that you were going
with the same sort of spirit as if you went to one of the art
shows that Hitler put on about decadent art,
decadent or Jewish art, and this sort of stuff.
Another 114,000 people saw the exposition when it went on a
tour of the provinces. Another exposition called "The
Jew in France" attracted in 1942 250,000 visitors in Paris and
100,000 in the provinces.

The German film that--to which
the Nazis and other Rightists in Germany had flocked called
The Jew Sss which ends with a Jew being hung,
to the frenzied applause of audiences, was shown in France
and people did go to see it, not huge numbers of people,
and there were even demonstrations in two cities.
But in Tours, on the Loire,
people lined up around the block in order to come in and
see this essentially Hitler--well,
Nazi publicity movie. And the collaborationist
newspaper, Je Suis Partout, or I Am
Everywhere, sold 250,000 copies in 1942 and
300,000 by 1944; yes, 1944, which ends as you
know in August in 1944--1944 doesn't end in August but the
Germans are--Paris falls at the end of August 1944 and then
gradually the war moves to the east.
In a novel by a guy called Lucien Rebatet,
called Les Decombres sold--a very rightwing
thing--sold 65,000 copies, which is a huge sale in France,
its first month out and its publisher claimed that only the
shortage of paper, war rationing,
kept him from selling another 200,000 copies.
And here's a glimpse of what is in the novel.
"I wish the victory of Germany because her war is my war.
Oh, my machinegun, so often caressed in my dreams,
facing the despised gangs of the Popular Front,
the gilded ghettos of Sodom. One hundred well aimed machine
gun bursts." He exuded about the sight of
Jews wearing yellow stars, the Jewish bacillus,
the Jewish microbe, and all this.
Now, the French record is not very good, even compared with
other countries, the spectacular exception being
Slovakia, which was certainly one of the worst places you
could possibly have been as a Jew,
and not too far from Auschwitz, across the frontier in Poland,
which turned over both natives and foreign Jews to Nazis right
away. Vichy France was the only
country in which local authorities deported Jews
without the presence of occupying forces.
And in Hungary, which had had anti-Semitic
legislation since 1920, even the vicious admiral called
Horthy--he is not in the course but he was vicious anyway,
h-o-r-t-h-y--handed over no Jews who were Hungarian Jews
until German occupation in 1944.

In Denmark only seven percent
of the Jews disappeared, helped by Danes and the
proximity of Sweden. Malmo was just across the
straights, it's still just across the straights,
except there's a bridge now. Yet France was the country in
which the greatest percentage of Jews or a great percentage of
Jews survived the war. In all, only twenty-four
percent of the Jews were deported, as opposed to
seventy-eight percent in the Netherlands and forty-five from
Belgium, and ultimately fifty percent
from Hungary.

Now, there's another thing
going on too, just look at the map.
There's nowhere to hide in the Netherlands or in Belgium,
basically; in Belgium, it's flat,
there's no--and I'll give you some examples of where Jews were
saved because of geographic kind of donn,
the lay of the land. But such figures were marshaled
by those apologizing for the Vichy regime.
And to repeat something that--borrowing from Robert
Paxton that I said the other day,
Vichy might have saved the French state,
in quotes, but it lost the French nation.
Now what about resistance? Well, first of all what about
Mitterrand? Franois Mitterrand was
the President of France between 1981, May of 1981,
and see he would've been out--1981, '91.
Was '91 the end of his term? I can't remember.
No, it was fourteen years, it should be '81 to '95;
and now the term is five years. Franois Mitterrand was
a socialist who started out his term in 1981 with lots of
socialist economic policies and sort of backed up off from them,
but became somebody who was extremely popular in France.
And as he was dying, toward the very end of his
life, maybe a year before he died-- he had a very serious
illness. The journalists knew it and
unlike the journalists in the United States,
where something like that would be leaked immediately,
journalists did not leak this fact, but it was quite obvious
that Franois Mitterrand was ill.
And toward the end of his life two facts about his life came
out.

The first is that he had a very
old daughter from a liaison that had nothing to do with his
wife--that's fairly common in political France--but the
second, and for our purposes much more
important, was that he had himself been a collaborator;
this was the dark secret and he poured out his heart.
He said he had something he had to tell--he wasn't telling
himself, but he had to tell the French people that he had
collaborated early in the war. In fact, somebody came up with
a picture of him in a rightwing demonstration with the
Croix-de-Feu, or one of these groups against
immigrants, before World War II. Now, he had second thoughts
fairly early into the war and he ends up--he heads an important
branch of the resistance organization.
But he came to grips with his own past as France was
attempting to come to grips at the very same time.
Now, to the resistance. Who resisted and why did they
resist? And again, just as the question
of collaboration was probably--and the discovery of
massive collaboration, and it wasn't just a few
people, a few elites, this was the dark secret of the
dark years, as Julian Jackson called this
period.

So is the case with the
resistance. And as I began the lecture last
time, Charles de Gaulle was determined that the France of
the Fourth Republic was to be built around his large body,
and part of that was to try to convince people in France and
abroad that the Gaullists were the only resistors and that they
had heard the crackle of his voice,
imposing voice, across the airwaves on June
18th, 1940. Now, what can we say now?
First of all, that the communists were
arguably the most important or most effective resistors during
the period. And it's certainly that after
the Jews the communists suffered most.
Vichy not only handed the Nazis lists of those they arrested as
communists but also executed many of them themselves,
beginning in 1941, for no other reason than their
political affiliation.

Vichy's Minister of the
Interior chose communists rather those he called "good" Frenchmen
to be gunned down by German firing squads in the fortress of
Mont-Valrien, outside of Paris.
Now, the socialist presence, the Socialist Party's presence
in the resistance as an organized force was not as
great. But there's several obvious
reasons for that. The communists benefited from
the fact that they had cells in virtually every commune in
France--and that's what they called them, cell.
There are still, in our village of 300 people,
a Communist Party cell which involves basically just five or
six of our friends who are anything but the communists of
Moscow and all this, but who are defenders of those
who have no one else to defend them, and that sort of thing,
including our dear friend, a former school teacher,
and some of our best friends in the world.
And occasionally in my mailbox I'll find an invitation from the
cell of Balazuc to a Communist Party gathering where--they've
asked me to talk on the collapse of capitalism,
and I have to explain to them that capitalism isn't probably
going to collapse in the near future,
and then we all, after some political
discussion, we all drink illegal wine essentially.
There's this wine called Clinton, as in Clinton but it's
nothing to do with Clinton, that was called sort of the
vin fou a little bit, and it grows all over the
place, the grapes do,
and because it grows so wildly it became sort of illegal to
produce this particular grape. And, so, one of the parts of
being a party of resistance is you don't pay any attention to
that, and to that extent I agree with that.
And, so, we would drink these bottles of Clinton.
And I've drunk bottles of Clinton with a guy who joined
the party, who's still alive.

He and his wife joined the
Communist Party in 1934 and he is still--he is a painter and he
painted lots of people, and lots of the paintings he
had done was in prison, in Paris, and he was very lucky
to escape execution, in part because of the
complicity of a guard. And to think that they joined
the Communist Party two years before the Spanish Civil War is
just incredible. So, the point of this is that
the advantage the Communist Party had is that they already
have organized, they have people in most every
large village who represent the Communist Party.
So, it's easy to organize your comrades, because you know who
they are and you can trust them after all of these years.
So, they have some advantages there.
Another advantage the Communist Party had--and I alluded to this
before--is they were basically the party of the
cheminaux, of the railroad workers and the
engineers. In any station you go to--go to
Rouen sometime, where I teach;
and I go to Rouen often because we have friends there--and look
in the railroad station, it's just unbelievable.
There's this huge plaque with about 200 names of
cheminaux, of railroad workers,
in the largest sense, who were killed,
executed by the Nazis or by the French fascists during the war.
In every railroad station.

So, the advantage there is
that--you know this from seeing all these movies I'm sure about
the resistance--it's pretty easy to blow up railroad tracks.
And, so, what they were able to do is blow up--how can you watch
the whole train line between Dijon, and Lyon,
and Marseilles, for example?
There was no TGV, obviously, that just started on
the 28th of September, 1981,
so it's easy for a couple of les gars,
of the guys, to go out and to blow up the
track, and it takes a long time to fix
the track, and they blow up that one and they fix that one and
then boom, further on down the line.
So, they were very active in the north, in Lille,
Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lyon, un peu partout.
And they were very much part of the CGT, that is the General
Confederation of Labor, and they were more apt to be
communist than any other party; and this is true in the suburbs
of Paris as well. So, they also had great
strength among metallurgical workers, and thus metallurgical
workers have access to flammable explosive materials,
and this sort of stuff. And, so, they also organized
very damaging industrial strikes, particularly in 1944,
and these strikes help give people a sense of hope,
that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
And of course there'd be people listening to BBC and that sort
of thing. A story about BBC, two stories.
Again, I hate to keep referring to this village but I wrote a
book on this village called The Stones of Balazuc and
at the end of it--well, one of the last chapters is
about the school, but I had to cover--do Vichy
and I had to do Vichy very, very delicately,
very delicately.

It was obvious that in our
village that the priest had--we don't have a priest anymore
there--but that the priest was a Ptainist and lots of
people hated him, not just because of his
politics, but a lot of people liked his politics,
but he used to sort of shout at people in the confessional and
there was all sorts of funny stories,
and he insisted that women sit on one side of the church still
and that men on the other. But this is a village that
wasn't an area of great resistance, even though arms
were parachuted down on a plateau near where we live--this
is down here in the Ardche.
But there were two people in the resistance and one is still
alive, a very old man, and they would hide
things--this is the pays calcaire,
it's limestone country, and big grottes,
caves along the river, and you could hide things
easily there. And I wanted to talk to this
man about the resistance and I--he's the uncle of a friend,
and finally I invited he and his wife over.
And I made clear that I wanted to ask him some questions,
not as a journalist but I'd been there in this place for
twenty years and I knew the guy a little bit,
and above all I knew his family. And he said yes he would come,
and he would talk to me about it because I'd been there so
long, but then he never showed up,
he didn't want to talk about it, he couldn't talk about it
because of--it's sort of like people coming back from World
War One.

The people that talked and
boasted were the ones who would dress up in military uniforms
when towns had been liberated, as if they had been there in
the beginning, out in the bushes,
the maquis, the resistors.
But he was a real one but he didn't want to talk about it.
But I also knew, speaking of BBC,
and this is the transition, that I'd heard this story that
a man in Balazuc had, in this particular village,
had alerted the authorities, the Vichy authorities to the
fact that some people were listening to BBC.
Now, you could be executed for listening to BBC--that was a
capital crime. And often they wouldn't,
if you were somebody they knew they wouldn't do that,
or whatever. But you denounced somebody for
listening to BBC and that's--it's not as bad as
denouncing somebody saying he's a Jew, but it ain't good.
So, I asked this friend of mine, an older man who could
remember the war, and I said what about that?
And I waited for the appropriate circumstances to ask
him. He said, "no,
no, it's just--don't pay any attention to it,
it's just rumor, it's just rumor,
it's a vicious rumor--les on dit',
rumor, les bruits, rumors," and all that.
So, in French, j'ai bien
serpent, I kind of snuck around a little
bit, serpented around,
and I asked some trusted people who are very discreet what about
it? And it turned out it was his
father, it was his father, who did it, and who was
associated with the priest in the village.
And I knew this man, he died a long time ago,
ten or fifteen years ago, but I knew the man.
And such secrets, are they best buried?
I buried it in the French edition of my book,
it's not in that; it's not in the Dutch edition,
either.

It's in the English edition but
hidden away, because he'll never know, never see and couldn't
read the English edition. So, all this stuff it's kind of
delicate, that whole business about--anyway.
So, people, the Communist Party became the party of the 75,000
martyrs because probably that many communists died,
whereas the socialists had a lack of structural organization
and many of their leaders like Lon Blum were in jail.
And as I said last time, just in passing,
there also was a leftwing Catholic resistance,
social Catholics, and no resistance publication
condemned racism and anti-Semitism with the vigor of
the newspaper Temoignage Chrtien,
or Christian Witness, basically. So, what about Jews?
It's hard to resist if you're being tracked down and being
arrested, it's--and by the way, remember Pierre Laval who was
the Prime Minister through much of the period,
he was on another occasion when the Germans insisted that French
parents, that French adults who were Jews be transported from a
certain sector, but they didn't ask for the
children, Pierre Laval said "send the children,
too"--famille, travail,
patrie--I mean that in a very ironic sense,
family, work, country--family values,
put the children together, and so the children bounced off
in the railroad car. But in fact I know this
Australian guy who was a young, very young man,
in Paris who's Jewish, a guy called Jacques Adler,
and I met him in Melbourne a few years ago and he survived
the war, but he was sixteen,
he was in an underground Jewish resistance group in Paris and he
wrote a book about it.

Then he went off and he made a
lot of money in Melbourne. He got out, he survived,
he became a cake producer. And then he went back and he
got his Ph.D. In French history at the
University of Melbourne with my friend Peter McPhee,
and then he wrote this book, a very good book on the Jewish
resistance.

But Jewish resistance was
organized in Paris where there were lots of Jews and had every
conceivable reason to resist, but only in cities like
Bordeaux where they're all getting locked up very quickly
and in Lyon and other places. So, but, the reason that I
insist on this fact, that there was an organized
Jewish resistance, is because among the sort of
anti-Semitic residuals in the post-war period is the
accusation that the Jews didn't resist,
they just kind of went off to be slaughtered and all of that,
and didn't put up a fight, which of course is obviously
not true. Now, the role of Protestants
has been often privileged in discussion of the resistance.
Again, to repeat what I said, the great percentage of
Protestants are down here again in the Ardche and in the
Gers, down here, in the
Cvennes mountains, basically;
also up in the Drme on the other side of the--in the
valleys that go down to the Rhne River,
into the Drme, d-r-o-m-e.
And the most famous case of Jewish children being saved is
that of a Protestant village, which I'm going to write on the
board because it deserves it, called Le Chambon-sur-Lignon,
right on the edge of the Ardche,
near Le Puy but in the mountains.
And what they did in this little teeny village is they
organized this kind of false identification network and they
took Jewish kids from Saint-tienne,
and Lyon, and other places in that region--that region is an
area that always sent lots of immigrants to--it's a very
Catholic region, but in this case in that
village very Protestant--had sent lots of immigrants to Lyon
and to Saint-tienne. And, so, they adopted all sorts
of Jewish kids.

And then when the Germans would
come through, you could hear them coming,
they would hide the kids or they'd go off into the woods.
But there seemed to be an awful lot of kids and the Germans
would go through, my God, these people must be
very Catholic, they're having babies all over
the place, look at all these kids;
and they never figured it out, the fact that they were
Protestant. And lots of people were saved
and there's a documentary on this.
A guy called Rod Kedward, H.R.
Kedward, has done two really interesting books on--probably
the best books on the resistance that are in English.
And he noted something very interesting about a commune,
a couple of villages in the Cvennes mountains in
which protestants resisted, and he noticed that in that
part of France the religious wars had been--in the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth century--had
been very bloody and they'd pitted basically the armies of
the king, of the most Catholic king,
against--well, you know that's the title that
they called the Spanish king, but anyway--of Louis XIV and
all these people, against protestants.
And he noticed that one particularly resistant village
that there was this huge mission cross overlooking the village
that had been planted there in the sixteenth century as a sign
of--or in the seventeenth century,
I don't know which war it was--as a sign of victory,
of conquest by the State and the Catholic Church over these
protestants. Does looking at something like
that all the time make you more want to resist a regime that's
closely tied to rightwing Catholicism?
Well, who knows, but Protestants were
over-represented in the resistance.
But, as I said, Catholics resisted too,
and from the point of view of the resistance or I suppose
anybody looking at this, it's easy to denounce many
Catholic archbishops and bishops who didn't give one damn about
the Jews and who embraced Vichy with a great passion.
But yet, in many places of Catholic--of villages that had
Catholics resisting, and most people in France are
nominally Catholics, the role of priests was
considerable, and the role of teachers
were--of instits, of primary school teachers,
was important as well. Now, priests,
I don't know what you--priests and school teachers are kind of
opinion makers or whatever the phase is;
they are people that, along with the mayor,
that sort out problems in a village.
And so if you have a priest who says enough of this stuff,
he can throw his weight and do good things--well,
again, look at Pre Jean, Father John,
tonight.

So, again the situation of the
Catholic Church is extremely complicated.
And the real explosion of work on the resistance has been
dominated by the stories of ordinary people taking very
unordinary choices, big-time choices.
A friend of mine called John Sweets who taught at University
of Kansas, at KU, he did a book on
Clairmont-Ferrand because that's where The Sorrow and the
Pity had--the town that it had been focused on,
and his book is called Choices in Vichy France.
And he was not critical of Paxton, which is the canon after
all, but he argued that you have to give them a wider description
of--or a wider definition of resistance,
in trying to determine how many people resisted.
Paxton thinks that about two percent of the French population
resisted. John Sweets thinks--and it's a
very good book, Choices in Vichy
France--thinks that oh maybe about--I can't remember what he
says, eighteen or twenty percent of
the population resisted. Well, what is resistance?
Lots of people took big-time chances, smuggling weapons;
you're going to get killed if they catch you,
you're gone, toast, finished.
But if you're in a movie theater and they're doing
the--showing the documentary--before the film
there's always this two minute news session which I can
remember as a tiny little boy, with always the same kind of
voices giving the news, and this would be the German
news translated into French. And if you whistle and you
boo--whistling is booing in France--or if you refuse to step
off the sidewalk to let a German officer pass,
that itself is a passive resistance.
And so certainly more people resisted, according to this
definition, than--and this was a type of choice in Vichy France.
One of the ways that people resisted was,
for example, passing these printed--these
newspapers that sort of mimeographed.
And there was a whole clandestine press and it was
very important because it would tell people in Normandy that
there'd been strikes in Saint-tienne,
or strikes in Marseilles, or it would give news on where
people thought that the battles were going and that kind of
thing.

How do you get newspapers
around? Well you just take a bunch of
them, on a bus--a bus in Lyon, for example,
and the bus is going around the Place Bellecour and you just
hold your hand out the window and drop all the leaflets.
Or there'd be leaflets against--when the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra played in Lyon somebody did that,
they took all these little handwritten and mimeographed
pieces of paper that said, non, don't go assist,
don't go listen to the Berlin Philharmonic,
let us resist--and that's a form of resistance too,
not going to hear the Berlin Philharmonic;
phew, and dropped them just like that.
And Lyon was a very effective center of the resistance.
I told you about Marc Bloch there, because in Lyon there are
these things called en franais traboules,
which are basically not tunnels but they're passages that began
in the sixteenth century to protect raw silk from being
rained on, in a pretty rainy climate.
And, so, the traboules also go up the Croix Russe which
is this old working class neighborhood that was outside,
only annexed to Lyon in 1852. And these traboules,
you can duck into these traboules,
and that's why the resistance was so important in Lyon,
and that's where Marc Bloch went when Marc Bloch had gone
down here. He was up near Gerais here and
he's just kind of anxious and he says I should go do something,
so he goes to Lyon and he participates in the resistance
and of course he pays for it with his life.
What about women? Now, for decades nobody paid
attention to the role of women in the resistance.
Now, women were very rare in the hills.
By the way, the term maquis means basically
organized resistors. A maquis in French,
or les maquis, is kind of a brush,
that's a very thick brush behind which you can hide in
Corsica--that's where it comes from originally;
and then in the south of France on what you call in French the
aride, really dry, rocky countryside.
And, so, by 1943, by the end of 1943 in many
parts of France the maquis rule by night,
that they have increasing--their forces are
swollen by people moving into the resistance.
Now, some people had to feed these folks, some people had to
darn their socks or knit them things to stay warm.
Some people had to pass messages, and there are all
sorts of stories about women on bicycles--it's one of these sort
of things that you see in movies-- but of women on
bicycles sort of charming--young women charming the guards if
they have the bad luck to fall upon the militia or German
guards and having a written message,
which is a terrible idea, but at least they'd have a
verbal communication of passing messages into the hills.
Now, the largest resistance movement and most effective in
Europe by far, de loin,
is in ex-Yugoslavia, and that's because of the
terrain in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Croatia, and in Serbia,
and they have entire divisions with hospitals,
mobile hospitals and all of that,
with the British parachuting things in.
But if you look at this map it's not surprising to see why
there's very little resistance, again here, so where are you
going to hide, there's nowhere to hide.
So, the maquis, the resistance--there are
maquis all over the place but it's easier in the south,
and it's by the end of '43 that the--and I said last time about
find a K on your door in the morning,
where someone was there to put K on the door in the morning,
and there you go.

And, so, the role of women has
been much more important than people had thought and there are
all sorts of wide--a big literature,
or a growing literature, on this now.
And also in some places, in Auvrgne,
for example, the numbers of
maquisards, of people in the resistance,
of maquis, was swollen by refugees from
Spain, or even from Poland.
So, you have these people living out there.
And only three times in France during the period did they try
to take on German military units in a pitched battle--bad idea,
terrible idea. One is right near
Clermont-Ferrand, here.
One is in the Vercors, near Grenoble,
down here. And the third,
I don't remember where it is. So, that doesn't work very well
because they don't have the kind of big time tanks and that kind
of thing.

But they were able to regroup.
There are places--near us there's a village way up in the
hill, God, it's so beautiful, a church, this fabulous church,
at a place called Tende with this Romanesque
porte, entryway, that's just fabulous.
And there, there was a whole bunch of these people up there
and they had some fairly considerable arms--this isn't
the pitched battle--but then they get denounced;
there are always people that are going to sell other people's
lives away, there's no question about it.
There were true believers in the regime that's going to sell
people away, and the next thing they know--and another case near
us too, the next thing they know bam,
here come the parachutists are coming in there and the tanks
are rolling up or the smaller vehicles with machineguns,
real big machineguns and this kind of stuff,
and they are gone, they are just massacred.
And there are all sorts of places around where we live
where people were shot. And if you helped,
if you were a woman or you were--anyone,
you were a priest, you were a--you're anyone,
you're a schoolteacher and you help people and they catch you,
and particularly if you've killed a German,
you're gone, that's it.
I told you the story about the woman the other day who was a
collaborator up along the Rhne River and they blew
her brains out, the resistors did.
And in penance, as it were, in punishment,
they just execute people, just take hostages and execute
them; begin with people you think are
Communist and then just shoot the other people.
Look what happened in the Czech Republic in ex-Czechoslovakia.
In Prague I've gone to the place where Richard Heydrich,
who was one of the very worst of the worst,
was assassinated by Czech maquis and he's gunned
down as he's coming in, and he fights them,
and he's finally mortally wounded and all that.
And they go and they hide in this church that I went to visit
in Prague a couple of years ago, and they of course perish
horribly. But they took an entire village
called Lidice and kill everybody.
It's rather like Sara Farmer's book, Oradour-sur-Glane,
which really needs no discussion now.
Now, what led people--well, first of all,
one quick point, is that again I've said that if
you took a map of--I've said this I guess maybe even more
recently--but of de-Christianization,
allegiance to the French Revolution in 1790,
the elections of 1949 and 1981, you would have virtually the
same dpartements are Left, and virtually the same
dpartements are Right.
That doesn't work for the resistance.
Brittany, which has always been extremely conservative,
was a big resistance area. The same goes with rural
Normandy, and of course that's the most well known because of
the invasion, the Americans,
and the British, and the Australians,
and everybody, New Zealanders and Canadians,
invade here.

The Germans thought they were
going to invade here but they invade here.
And the resistance had already taken out lots of rail lines and
things like that, and General Eisenhower said
that they were worth two divisions or something like
that. Rural Normandy has always been
conservative. So, that interpretation doesn't
really work. There was lots of resistance in
Auvergne, which is conservative, and there was tons of
resistance in the Limousin, thus explaining--one reason
explaining the massacre on the 10th of June,
1944, or Oradour-sur-Glane.
So, you can't--there's no kind of geographic determinism,
regional determinism.

There is some geographic
determinism that is the lay of the land, but there's no
regional--there's not a predisposition of Bretons not to
resist, because they do resist.
They resist--not everybody, but the resistance is important
in Brittany and these kinds of places.
Now, without question the big defining moment swelling the
ranks of the resistance is the service du travail
obligatoire; in February,
the STO, that is the service of obligatory work where the
Germans say we want men from each region to go to Germany and
work in the factories. The reason is they have so many
people dead, so many killed, and they need work.
And this swells the ranks of resistors, this forces families
and individuals to make choices in Vichy France,
again to borrow from John's title.
This builds on a policy in June '42 announced by Pierre Laval
called the relve, or the relief team that would
send specialized French workers to Germany, in exchange for the
release of French prisoners of war from 1940--ha ha.
But now they say, "well, you got to go," and
they'll show up into your village and you better be ready
to go. 650,000 Workers were sent to
Germany as conscript labor. This also contributes to
discredit further the Vichy regime vis--vis its
population, and the grumbling about
Ptain, the grumbling about shortages
and the grumbling about the German soldiers give way now to
more open resentment.

The Bishop of Lille,
a guy called Cardinale Lonarde,
who had kept quiet about the increasingly obvious fate of
Jews announced it was no longer a duty for a Christian to go to
work in Germany--merci monsieur.
And, so, this swells this nomadic tribe of resistors
living from day to day in the mountains and the hills.
And it's a scary existence, you're listening through the
night, or in the day, for the roar of machines,
the roar of the rival airplanes or of fast speeding German cars,
and you're freezing in snow, bored, tired,
anxious, far, far away, demoralized and
understandably terrified. Now, most of the maquis
were city folks, they were the majority.
And most of France is not urban people in 1943 and 1944.
That was because it was easier to round up people to be sent in
the STO, that is the obligatory labor service,
if you were from a city where you had all sorts of soldiers
who'd come out and pick you up. And so the Limousin probably is
the classic example, that is in the area in which
Oradour-sur-Glane takes, where it became--it was not a
mass, mass movement, but where you still have all
sorts of people that are part of underground organizations or are
part of the Gaullist resistance, and Jean Moulin--the reason I
have his name up here, he was a former prefect of the
Eure-et-Loire, which is the department of
Chartres, in the Blois, south of Paris,
a beautiful cathedral town. And then he ends up himself
getting denounced, and tortured,
and all of that.

But the resistance,
whether they were Gaullists, or whether they were
communists, or whether they had no
affiliation at all, pas d'affiliation,
the resistance depended on neighborhood,
small town and above all village networks;
thus the role of the school teacher or some kind of local
leader. A communist was wounded by
French gendarmes, in a village in the Var,
that is the department of Toulon,
and Saint-Tropez, and all of that on the
Mediterranean. He was hidden by a peasant in
one of these networks, but his untreated wound
developed gangrene. Two doctors took care of him,
alerted by the wife of an agent of a resistance organization.
In all, ten people combined, at the risk of their life,
of saving the life of one resistor.
And, of course ironically in areas like the Limousin that if
I insisted, and I'm right in doing so,
that as Paxton and others have argued, that Vichy saw itself as
the regime of la terre, of the land,
that the real values were Joan of Arc and peasants and all that
business.

The cult of the peasant
resistor in areas like the Limousin, that is around Limoges
and at Tulle, the massacre at Tulle and all
these places, was an important one as well.
Now, after the June 6th landings in Normandy--and as you
know the troops are also moving up,
after the landings in the south, are moving up the
Rhne Valley, killing lots of people on the
way. Then it became easier to resist
and so therefore the temptation after the war was to say,
oh, "moi aussi, j'tais l,"
"I was resisting and wasn't I. Dear?"
"Oh yes your gun was always ready," et cetera,
et cetera. And everybody kind of jumped
forward in Privas.

In the prefecture of the
Ardche there was--they'd have this big sort of joyous
celebration when the town is liberated and then they noticed,
some of the resistors noticed that all sorts of people had
dressed up in fancy military clothes and all of that;
they had nothing to do with the resistance at all.
Some of them were trying to save their skins because they
had rather different sympathies a few weeks ago,
before that, or a few months before that.
And as I said near our village there was a priest who was lined
up on a wall and shot down because he had--because he had
had Dat to lunch, who was a fascist,
sometime earlier in the period. There were about 24,000
maquis who were killed in the liberation of France.
And in Paris, above all, but in other cities
as well, you can walk along and you see signs that say,
"Ici est tomb," Here Fell on the 24th of August,
1944, so-and-so, from one of the resistance
groups. And occasionally you'll see a
flower, a new flower is put there, by somebody who remembers
or somebody aware of the collective memory;
especially around the Prefecture of Police in Paris.
I've always thought it was cruel, and this is cynical,
but they should've put in some of the fancier quarters of
Paris, in Passy and places like that,
"Ici a collabor Monsieur et Madame le Comte de
quelque chose," 1940 or 1944.
But that's not nice, and not very generous,
and I make no apologies for it. There were--again,
just to end with these little--I'll just end with this,
that at the time of the Papon trial when Papon was arguing,
he says, "well I was a good bureaucrat, my superiors liked
what I did and I was protecting these other Jews by sending away
the hundreds whom I made possible their departure from
the Gare Saint-Jean." There was another little story
that came along, and I don't remember where I
read it, but there was a young woman who
worked as a secretary in the prefecture or in the police or
somewhere like that, and she--because of people like
Papon, you had lists of all the people who were Jews or all the
people who were communists, in the Gironde or in Bordeaux,
and that these things are kept in files.
But this is before the computer, the quiet violence of
the computer, and these were lists that were
done by hand, and she simply went into the
drawers and ripped them up, ripped up the lists,
and put the scrap paper not in the wastepaper basket but in her
pocket and went out and deposited it in the first
poubelle or garbage can that she found.
Heroic acts, choices in Vichy France--it
made you think, it made you decide what to do.
.