France Libre

Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

In the spring of 1940, France’s “phony war” with Germany, begun the preceding year, turned all too real. Within a matter of weeks, its government, along with its army, was in frantic retreat. As a caravan of government ministers and parliamentarians bounced from one temporary capital to another, the republic’s ideals and institutions were left by the wayside. In what came to be known as “the Exodus,” millions of civilians, attacked by German planes and abandoned by the French state, thickened the roads as they fled the Nazi advance.

On June 17, the elderly Marshal Philippe Pétain, freshly named France’s leader, sued for peace. The vast French majority, desperate to return to their homes and to avoid reliving the nightmares of World War I, supported him. But a handful did not. They, and those who joined them by 1944, are the subjects of Olivier Wieviorka’s detailed but dry account, The French Resistance.

Wieviorka’s aim, he makes clear, is to study the Resistance as an organization. He thus carefully traces the evolution of the often-fraught relationship between the internal Resistance in France and Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Free French, the Resistance’s growing complexity (and costliness) as a bureaucracy, and its debates over goals and approaches.

Wieviorka, a professor of history at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, states what seems to be a simple truth. “Historiographical discourse … must provide explanations, not stir emotions. Unlike the novelist or filmmaker, the historian refrains from playing on emotions.” While the tragedies and torments running through these events “cannot leave us indifferent,” the historian “must not let such reactions sway him. If he did, he would lapse into hagiography and would abdicate the critical faculty at the foundation of the discipline.”

This claim, however, betrays a stunning naïveté. The work of Hayden White, Roger Chartier, and other theorists reminds us that history writing calls upon the same narrative strategies as novel writing. More tellingly, few enduring historians who have shaped our understanding of the past, from Thucydides through Tacitus to Tuchman, would recognize themselves in Wieviorka’s description. He presents, in fact, a false choice. Far from a cold-blooded analysis of past events, historical explanation calls upon the emotional involvement of both the historian and her readers. If a historian holds fast to Wieviorka’s distinction, his narrative will resemble a panorama of stuffed beasts at the Museum of Natural History, edifying but unexciting.

For all that, it’s understandable why Wieviorka insists on objectivity. Few chapters in French history are as treacherous as the “dark years” between 1940 and 1944. It was a brief but brutal experience that began with the death of the French Third Republic and birth of Pétain’s authoritarian and anti-Semitic Vichy regime. Under the German occupying forces, black markets flourished and endless lines for rutabagas became the new normal. By 1943, the Germans demanded not just material, but also men to work their factories and farms. Vichy’s ministers and police officers enabled the deportation of French workers and the very different deportation of French and foreign Jews to the death camps.

Most French, as the historian Philippe Burrin has well documented, had accommodated themselves to their grim new world. Yet, crucially, there were minorities who entered into active collaboration with the Germans or into resistance against them. Following liberation, however, a single narrative took hold: that an entire people, united under the French Resistance and Free French, had thrown out the Germans and their handful of French lackeys. With the connivance of the resistance movements and assent of an exhausted nation, General de Gaulle wove this myth with great care. He was convinced, perhaps rightly, that it would help a dazed and divided nation devote its energies to economic and political reconstruction rather than to a bloody settling of accounts.

As a result, the history and historiography of the Resistance strangely resemble one another. Both were the work of absolute beginners who, at first, had no more experience writing historical accounts than they did dynamiting rail lines. Moreover, it was the memoirs of résistants that laid the foundations for the historiography. Apart from a few discordant voices, this foundation supported the Gaullist myth of a people united against the German forces and Vichyist collaborators.

As the years passed, the foundation began to fissure. Just as the Resistance evolved from a collection of rank amateurs to a guild of experienced professionals, so too did those who studied the movement. Over time, this led to tension and, at times, confrontations between those who represented the Resistance and those who re-presented it. Most famously, there was the Aubrac affair, when the journalist Gérard Chauvy published a book in 1997 that accused Raymond Aubrac, long an iconic figure of the Resistance, of having betrayed the Resistance hero and martyr Jean Moulin. The newspaper Libération convened a round table of historians that cleared Aubrac of Chauvy’s charges but expressed shock that Raymond Aubrac and his wife, Lucie, had forgotten details to events that transpired a half-century earlier. Moreover, a few of the assembled scholars lambasted Lucie Aubrac for her well-known account of her years in the Resistance. She had, declared one historian in high dudgeon, passed off “an exciting adventure novel as her memoirs.” (Years later, the historian Laurent Douzou, a dissenting member of this tribunal, published a critically acclaimed biography of Lucie Aubrac, which demolished her critics’ charges.)

Few historians can navigate the complexities of this period with Wieviorka’s skill and assurance. Yet, given his allergy to “playing on emotions,” Wieviorka favors dissection over introspection and classifying individuals as types rather than casting them as actors in a compelling story. It is for the reader to find the drama amid the jumble of Resistance-movement acronyms.

One might wish to consult Robert Gildea’s recently published history of the Resistance, Fighters in the Shadows (Harvard University Press, 2015), which masterfully combines explanation and emotion. But for those who want to deepen their knowledge of the period, Wieviorka’s book is still a valuable resource. He reminds us that the decision to join the Resistance was a matter not just of ideals but also of socioeconomic backgrounds. Middle-class professionals, and skilled workers to a lesser extent, dominated the movement. Background also helped determine one’s effectiveness as a résistant: A typesetter or labor organizer’s skills were more germane than those of a notary or musician. No less important, Wieviorka underscores that the Resistance, far from being all cloak and dagger, was often a matter of listlessness and lice during long stretches spent in the maquis of southern France. It was also a matter of francs and forms. By 1944, the various movements had become bureaucracies staffed by men and women who expected a paycheck as much as they did glory.

This was as it should be. The writer André Malraux once described Charles de Gaulle as a man who was equal to his myth. We cannot say the same of the Resistance, but then the furthering of liberty, equality, and fraternity is generally not a glamorous business.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. He is the author, most recently, of Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2015).