The French Resistance during World War II: its Myth and its Memory in Cinematographic Arts

by Gaëtan Carpentier, M.A.

With this essay, I introduce my position on a topic in historical studies that I believe is still evolving, enriching, and revolutionizing the ways people understand and appreciate history. The topic I approach in this essay is Cultural Memory. In some ways, the study of Cultural Memory emphasizes on the importance of the process known as historiography, and it incorporates characteristics of cultural studies, with its meanings and objects. Most scholars consider Cultural Memory as either a way to understand our past through presentism, or it is a way to define a given contemporary society through the influential path or its past. Although I cannot deny the importance of these views, I define Cultural Memory as a combination of both. It is the definition of our past through our interpretation of it at the present time, but I consciously understand that this present was shaped by the past. I attempt in this essay to define my school of thoughts in showing the blur between the present and the past, both shaping simultaneously one another.

In an interview, published in 1971, with Rui Nogueira, a journalist and author of cinematographic reviews, film director Jean-Pierre Melville declared, “I show things that I have seen, that I have experienced. However, my truth is, of course, subjective and has nothing to do with the truth. With time, we tend to remember what suits us rather than what actually took place.” After reading Melville’s statement, which he delivered in talking about his film L’ Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), one might question the veracity of the representation of the French Resistance in Melville’s motion picture. With the forever-disappearance of the veterans of World War II and the ever-fading memory of the conflict in the United States of America and in Western Europe, and with similar statements like Melville’s, scholars cast doubt on the truthfulness of eyewitness stories and memoires, and their representations of an interpreted past in popular culture. This predominant concern about truthfulness of these types of accounts is genuine. Scholars continue to study the path to memory through the employment of the cinematographic art, and scholars analyze the motivations and works of individuals who have chosen to express their memory with mass cultural technologies. With motion pictures, film directors have created fictional and romanticized stories about the French Resistance, and they have turned masterpieces into historical referents of a grim époque. In analyzing these cinematographic frescos, and in particular Melville’s L’ Armée des ombres, scholars see an attempt to influence public opinion and to create a strong mythical representation of the resisters, while simultaneously depicting the devilishness of the collaboration. These issues have one origin and one purpose: it is the need for the survival of a memory of a defeated, humiliated, and martyrized nation, a memory of an unified nation, a memory of the past glory and grandeur of France in difficult times.

Despite its poignant testimony to the sacrifice of lives for a cause said to be just, L’Armée des ombres is at the center of a debate related to the purpose of a certain representation of the resistance in the cinematographic art to define post-war cultural heritage in France. This debate relates to the creation of a memory based on the false representation of past historical events. This said, scholars, like Panivong Norindr or Naomi Greene, cannot regard the motion picture industry in France in the second half of the twentieth-century as an industry dedicated to the fabrication of a misleading image of the conquered population’s daily life. Films are not only a representation of an imagined past where reality is only a shadow. The cinematographic art industry had to portray the valorous resisters and evil collaborators in a seemingly truthful historical context. L’Armée des ombres, by Melville (France, 1969), is a representative example of this depiction of reality for a part of the French society during World War II. In addition, this movie is an exemplary tool of propaganda designed for the support of conservative political ends and the stabilization of a society in turmoil at the time of its release in theaters in 1969. Melville’s film is additionally a tool for the promotion of a mythical man, Charles de Gaulle, who as the president of the French Republic in the late 1960s lost the trust of his electorate because his socio-economic policies did not meet the masses’ needs.

With an existing consensus among academics that the role of cinema is a complex issue, scholars must critically understand that the interactivity between people’s memories and historical narratives found in motion pictures is simply more than an analysis of the role of cinema on people, but also its function as a tool for government’s impact on society.

This paper analyzes this interactivity between memory and history in showing how a particular present — the socio-political situation in France at the release of Melville’s movie in theaters in 1969 —interacts with the presentation of a historical interpretation of the past that is influenced by Melville’s own memory and by the conservative political ends of the Gaullist movement. Using interpretation lenses borrowed from theories by Maurice Halbwachs’s Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition, Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, the author demonstrates the role of this cinematography fresco as a tool of social and political stabilization in troubled France, during the last cultural revolution. The author believes that Melville’s L’Armée des ombres was not only vital as a tool for this stabilization, but it was also important to re-establish a sense of respect for a man who had helped France to revive from the disaster of World War II. This man was Charles de Gaulle. He was the man who initiated the myth of the French Resistance with his call, on June 18, 1940. From the studios of the BBC London, Charles de Gaulle invited the French population to mobilize and to continue the fight against the Nazi occupier. In these terms, he addressed those who could hear him,

Moi, Général de Gaulle, actuellement à Londres, j’invite les officiers et les soldats français qui se trouvent en territoire britannique ou qui viendraient à s’y trouver, avec leurs armes ou sans leurs armes, j’invite les ingénieurs et les ouvriers spécialistes des industries d’armement qui se trouvent en territoire britannique ou qui viendraient à s’y trouver, à se mettre en rapport avec moi. Quoi qu’il arrive, la flamme de la résistance française ne doit pas s’éteindre et ne s’éteindra pas.

Lastly, this paper analyzes the myth of the French Resistance within Melville’s film, and it attempts to demonstrate that the film was not an act of pure imagination. While acknowledging Melville’s need for telling the story of his personal experience within the French Resistance, this analysis shows the reality of life during the occupation that perspires through the scenario and the plot of the movie. This reality was the historical context of Melville’s film. The myth was the exaggerated representation of a group of men and women who fought alongside the exiled Charles de Gaulle.

This aim of this paper reflects the need for scholars to define the interaction between memory and history through the analysis of the employment of mechanics of propaganda that a political man — Charles de Gaulle — whose determination to lead France out of its republican cultural and political stagnation, has employed to consolidate his conservative political power. Certainly, this interaction helps in grasping the role of cinema in post-modern society as a political tool, but cinema is also a means to create, consolidate, and promote a myth — in this case, the myth of the French Resistance. In turn, this myth becomes the memory of a society because cinema possesses the ability to create emotions equal to those that society experience during historical events. In Prosthetic Memory, Alison Landsberg teaches that mass cultural technologies, like cinema, permit the creation of a new relationship with the past based on the sensorial appeal of the viewer and make it “possible to experience an event or a past without having actually lived through it.” These emotions are born from an image of a past that has a significance for the French Gaullist political class and for the social stabilization of a culture. This is the socio-political role of Melville’s film, L’Armée des ombres.

To better understand the interactivity between memory and history, the role of Melville’s film in the manipulation of memory in its socio-political context, and the consolidation of the myth of the French Resistance in the late 1960s, one must first analyze the film itself to discern the various elements at play. Then, a comparative approach is necessary to decipher the fiction from the reality. The first step of this analysis involves the comparison of Melville’s work with a French contemporary documentary by Marcel Ophuls, Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969). The subsequent examination of these works requires the parallel of Melville’s work with another contemporary fictional movie by Paul Verhoeven, Soldaat van Oranje (1977). With the latter, the writer aims at showing the reality in fictional works.

L’Armée des ombres is a film by director Jean-Pierre Melville based on an adaptation of Josef Kessel’s novel, L’Armée des ombres. Published in London, in 1943, Kessel’s novel is a fictional masterpiece based on witness accounts collected, from members of the resistance, by the author at the Forces françaises libres (FFL) [Free French Forces] headquarter in London between 1940 and 1943. The genre of this film is not following the characteristics of war movies, but rather it is an enigmatic thriller. Following the plot of the film is at time difficult because it provides the viewer with little information about time and place. This characteristic makes the historical context seeming anachronistic, out of time, and inaccessible. The storyline seems, like in Kessel’s novel, to be a gathering of anecdotes. Unlike in the novel, however, Melville assigns the many anecdotes to only a few of his characters. This technique amplifies the vital role of each member of the French Resistance with the motion picture.

With a play of faded colors and a dark scene, the motion picture begins with the Nazi troops marching down the Champs-Elysées, in Paris, on June 14, 1940. Out of place and out of time, the plot of the movie itself does not begin until the end of 1942, when the police of the Vichy Regime arrest, in Free Zone France, Philippe Gerbier (acted by Lino Ventura), a civil engineer, for his Gaullist political convictions. After his arrest, the police detain Gerbier in a prisoners of war camp, which French authorities had initially built for the detention of captured German troops — viewers experience a feeling of historical irony. After spending few months in the detention camps, the Gestapo transferred Gerbier to its headquarters in Paris. In Paris, Gerbier uses deception to escape from his jailors, kills a few Germans during his escape, and disappears in the night, in the shadows of life. Gerbier, now free, finds his way back to Marseille where he rejoins his resistance network. After his arrival in Marseille, Gerbier and consorts kidnap one member of their group, Paul Dounat (Alain Libolt) with three of his associates, Félix Lepercq (Paul Grauchet), Guillaume Vermersch, alias Le Bison (Christian Barbier), and Claude Ullmann, alias Le Masque (Claude Mann). Paul Dounat had betrayed Gerbier. His betrayal had led to Gerbier’s arrest in the Free Zone. After a short discussion between Gerbier and his accomplices, in which they argue on a quiet killing method, Gerbier, Félix, and Le Masque decide, finally, to murder Paul by strangulation. After the murder, Félix, still under the shock of this sickening kangaroo execution, enters a bar where he meets a former combat comrade, Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel) — they had both fought the Nazi invasion in May 1940. While sharing a beer and talking of their adventures, Félix invites Jean-François to join his group of fellow resisters. As a rite of passage, Jean-François’s first job consisted in carrying through the demarcation line some radio equipment to Mathilde (Simone Signoret), in Paris. The operation is a success. In Paris, Jean-François takes the opportunity to visit his brother, Luc Jardie — although Jean-François does not know that his brother is the head of the network of resisters, the viewer has a clear understanding of this fact. With this scene, the director allows the viewer to discover France, the pseudo-judicial system of incarceration during the Regime of Vichy, the attentisme — wait-and-see policy — of the French population, the kangaroo court system and the need for secrecy within the French Resistance, and the recruitment of new members in the underground network.

In the following scene, relocated in Lyon, Gerbier and Félix plan Gerbier’s trip to Charles de Gaulle’s headquarters in London. Jean-François is in charge of the security during the trip to the southern coastline and has the privilege to meet le Grand Patron, Luc Jardie — here the viewer understands the vitality of secrecy within the network and the ignorance of blood relatives of their involvement in the clandestine group. At his arrival in London, Gerbier meet with Charles de Gaulle — the head of the government of Free France and of the Resistance. In London, Gerbier also experiences a night bombing and learns that the Gestapo had arrested Félix a few days before. Upon learning this disastrous news, Gerbier returns to France — the same night. In the meantime, Mathilde studies the options to free Félix from the Gestapo, but she concedes she cannot notify Félix of their scheme. Alarmed with this issue, Jean-François decides to turn himself to the authorities. With his arrest, Jean-François hopes he will be able to warn Félix of the gang’s recovery plan. Melville shows in this scene the risks and dangers the underground network faces daily in the French occupied nation.

Unaware of Jean-François’s action and arrest, in the meantime, Mathilde carries-out the audacious plan to rescue Félix. She enters the military prison with forged orders claiming Félix’s transfer to the Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Mathilde successfully enters the headquarter in Lyon with two members of the network, disguised in German medical uniforms. The rescue attempt is fruitless because the German doctor on duty states that Félix was too weak to survive the transfer. Jean-François, residing with Félix, in the same prison cell, and realizing the failure of the rescue attempt, offers his cyanide pill to his comrade to end his suffering — Félix dies from the poison, and Jean-François in the hands of his jailors. This scene shows the comradeship between the members of the resistance network and the quasi certain outcome — death — for those members the Nazis captured.

Gerbier parachutes over France. In Lyon, the Vichy Militia once again arrests Gerbier in a restaurant — he had just met with Mathilde who had given him piece of paper containing a list of names. Before his arrest, Gerbier has time to eat the paper Mathilde had just given to him. Detained in a Nazi prison for the murder of German soldier at the Paris Gestapo headquarters, Gerbier understands he has lost; Germans soldiers take to a shooting range where they had assembled several prisoners for execution. Running senselessly for his life in the shooting range as the Germans fire their machine guns on the prisoners, Gerbier escapes again. Mathilde and her gang had organized his rescue. Gerbier is alive, but wounded. He now stays in an isolated house in the French countryside. With this scene, Melville shows the solitary living the members of the underground network faces in joining the fight against the Nazi occupier.

As the days go by, Gerbier, in his safe house, reads books and writes reports for le Grand Patron. Luc Jardie visits him and informs him of Mathilde’s arrest. After having decoded a message that Le Bison and Le Masque had brought to him, Gerbier and his boss discover the Gestapo had released Mathilde in hopes of dismantling their network. As a result, for safe keeping the integrity of the network, Mathilde has to die. A few days later, according to their plan, Le Bison guns down Mathilde as she approaches their car, which Le Masque drives. On the back seat, le Grand Patron and Gerbier witness the execution they have ordered. In this scene, the director shows the survival of the underground network and of its members, even to the extend of disposing of a suspected mole in order to maintain anonymity.

The film ends with the description of the tragic end-of-life of the four occupants of the automobile; none of them lives to see the end of the war as they die in continuing their altruistic and heroic fight against the Nazis. With this end, the director emphasizes on the human drama while erasing the memory of the French Resistance.

In L’Armée des ombres original trailer, one repeated question highlights the seriousness of the film: “Qui sont-ils?” [Who are they?] Indeed, who are these people, those depicted in this film? Are they real or fictional, alive or dead? Are their stories true stories? Can we remember these people and their role in society? With this simple question, Jean-Pierre Melville announces his aim with the film: to tell a story not so much about the resistance he knew, but rather a story about human tragedies he might have experienced. To tell the story, in mimicking the novel of Joseph Kessel from which it is inspired, Melville sets the scene in France during the Nazi occupation, and he sets the plot with the difficult and hazardous business of the French Resistance. However, unlike Kessel, Melville romanticized his characters. Although Melville does not excessively emphasize on the emotional traits of his characters, he does set them in situations that call for an emotional reaction of the viewer. This empathy and sympathy the viewer feels for the character has no ground in the historical context of the French Resistance in the 1940s, but it has one in the cultural context of France in the 1960s. In subtracting the real from his characters, Melville casts some doubts on the truthfulness of the elements associated to the historical period and the details recounted about the French Resistance; the only historical fact in the motion picture is the Nazi occupation. With this understanding, one can imagine that the rest of the story is pure myth.

Many questions certainly arise from this concern about the myth of the French Resistance because, in Melville’s film and in Kessel’s novel, these accounts describing the life of the people under the Nazi occupation and the collaborating French administration that may not reflect the life experience with any absolute accuracy. These stories, narrating the existence of men and women who have battled the occupiers and sacrificed their lives, do not adequately express the admiration or the scorn the authors felt for them. The movie only shows the story of a handful of characters, all fictional, whose contact with the local population is absent. Similarly, these stories do not exhibit properly the public’s feelings toward those people who had accepted the dominance of an enemy and had worked with it to re-establish functioning institutions — this aspect of the war is not narrated in Melville’s film. Much more concerns may appear regarding the propaganda efforts, after the war, of the governments of the Fourth and the Fifth French Republic to promote the renewal of national identity and to legitimate their rise to power as the natural successors of the Resistance. In Martyred Village, Sarah Farmer tells the reader that Charles de Gaulle wanted “to claim legitimacy for France as a country that had suffered under the Nazis and deserved to reclaim her ranks as a great nation.” In other words, with these concerns, the writer claims that one of Melville’s film purpose is to fuel the myth of the Resistance — a myth that Charles de Gaulle created with his call to resist on June 18, 1940. With the representation of an imagined past, the first resister of France, Charles de Gaulle attempted to unify a defeated and martyrized France. De Gaulle needed to emphasize the survival of a memory of a defeated, humiliated, and martyrized populace, a memory of an unified nation, a memory of the past glory and grandeur of France in difficult times, such as the Nazi occupation in World War II and the socio-cultural revolution of May 1968.

Interestingly, despite the fictional nature of Melville’s L’Armée des ombres, the film is a representative example of a historical narrative of the French society during World War II that closely portrays the reality — even if this reality was the mirror of Melville’s own experience of the period. Since this film tells a story in which historical context and realism exist, one cannot assert the French Resistance during World War II was the sole creation of minds, and therefore the unique base for the creation of a myth. Even if Melville referred to his film as a vision of his own truth and an interpretation of his personal experience, the myth of the Resistance does not lay exclusively with the story telling this movie incarnates. Nonetheless, the attempt to influence public opinion, which definitively exists within the motion picture, can only refer to the duty of memory toward a minority of men and women, like Gerbier and Mathilde, who have sacrificed their lives in the name of freedom, in the name of their beloved nation. The myth of the Resistance only comes from a necessity to provide a social unity, coherence, and stability at times of deep socio-politico-economic troubles. France experienced these troubles in the 1940s with the Nazi invasion and occupation. France experienced these troubles again in the 1960s and 1970s. The events of May 1968, also known as les événements or Mai 68, were a socio-cultural movement that emerged from the stagnation of the French economy as the nation entered its final stage of decolonization and its integration in the European Economic Community. The events of May 1968 transformed France, showing the political class that the labor force and the youth (of all social strata) were segments of the population who had an opinion and a political voice. This population, unheard until then, wanted some changes and rejected social status quo that existed in France since the end of the Great War. The conflict largely split France along the generation line. The mature population was Gaullist. The youth was disillusioned with Charles de Gaulle’s vision and policies and was pro-Socialist. Melville released L’Armée des ombres during these tumultuous years.

In order to understand the argument of this essay, one must comprehend the philosophical interpretation the author believes is the leading factor to the creation of a myth. Some philosophers define a myth as a story that finds its roots in an imagined story loosely related to the reality, for which purpose is the social cohesion of a group. It is a story that attempts to provide a response or a satisfactory explanation, occasionally to historical events, and which is most likely fulfilling a function designed to provide a sense of social unity in presenting a preconceived image. The representation of this preconceived image finds its full maturity in the cinematographic art of the second half of the 20th century. Consequently, a motion picture, such as L’Armée des ombres, is the perfect basis to provide a romanticized and fictional portrait of the French society between the years 1940 and 1944, and particularly the mythic role of the resistance within it.

Furthermore, the first element helping with the creation of the myth of the resistance is the evident lack of abundance of historical documentations testifying to its existence, its organization, its efficiency, its members, and any other aspects. Being forced into secrecy from its establishment, the resistance (networks and movements) has left behind little paper traces for scholars’ interpretation. Many historians have explained this phenomenon with the precarious position of the resistance. Indeed, one major concern of the resistance in France was the need for assuring greater means of security for its members and its operations. Secrecy was important in the event the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) had captured one of its members. Without that secrecy, an entire network or movement was at risk of total disruption and annihilation. Therefore, the shortage of documents provides an ideal ground to create, through films and within the historical context, a revered and mythical image of the resistance.

Another important element of the creation of the myth is the abstract chivalry aspects of the resistance. It is the appeal and the aura of these brave, charismatic, and altruistic, yet ordinary, men and women of the resistance that can be depicted in reinforcing the idea of struggle between the good and the evil. After reviewing hours of audiovisual documentaries of the 1960s, such as Claude Levy’s Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), containing testimonies of resisters, a few impressions filtered out of the veterans’ statements: they were not heroes; they were simply patriots who had taken action against an oppressor. Nonetheless, this struggle between an underdog fighter and a strong, organized, and well-equipped enemy reminds the viewer the biblical epic and myth of David’s struggle against Goliath.

With this understanding of these multiple elements, the creation of the myth of the resistance is clearly established. However, although L’Armée des ombres is a fictional and romanticized story, it provides the viewer with a visual aid for the consideration of actual life in occupied France. The film is designed to revive the remembrance of a grim époque marked with the Nazi occupation and its challenges for the local population. It brings the viewer to discover a France of the past, the pseudo-judicial system of the Regime of Vichy, the attentisme of the French population, the need for anonymity in the French Resistance with its solitary living conditions and the danger of death members of the underground network faced in their daily struggle for survival.

Melville’s film is not the only audiovisual narrative of this grim époque. In 1969, the same year Melville released his motion picture, Director Marcel Ophuls released in a Parisian theater his documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity). Ophuls’s documentary is a collection of interviews and archival film footage of World War II. With the combination of these documents, Ophuls investigates the reality of life during the Nazi occupation in Clermont-Ferrand, Auvergne, at the center of France. The archival films are a combination of German and French footage of 1940s propaganda and the interviews are a collection of dialogues with French individuals who were involved with Vichy Regime, with the Resistance, common citizens trapped in the war, and with Germans who participated in the war of conquest and the occupation of France. Ophuls filmed these interviews in 1968 and 1969. The result provides an interesting view on the daily life of the French and the challenges they faced. This documentary shows also the geo-political complexity at play and the collapse of a society during the war. The documentary shows people, after the events of May 1968, still struggling and copping with their actions during the French debacle of 1940 and during the Nazi occupation until 1944. Ophuls’s documentary shows a France politically divided, but unified under its unified republican ideology. This documentary shows the real face of France and its understanding of the world war with an image, a memory of the past.

Melville’s film attempts to reproduce these images. One of these representations confers the attempt of the occupiers and the state-run collaborating administration to control the populace in an environment of fear. In L’Armée des ombres, Jean-Pierre Melville describes the tragic destiny of these men and women who have chosen an altruistic path to liberty in setting decors in each and every aspects of the detention system established in France during the first years of the Nazi occupation, from May 1940 until beginning 1943. Melville sets the tone with the complicity of the Regime of Vichy and the techniques of interrogation employed by the Gestapo in Paris.

In his first depiction, Melville tells the existence of internment camps throughout France. Gerbier, one of the protagonists in Melville’s film, is locked up in one of them. This internment camp was in Zone Libre (Free Zone), in the southern part of France, under the authority of the Regime of Vichy and guarded by French police. These camps, dispersed all over France, were under the control of the Regime of Vichy. In them, the police locked up the ‘enemies’ of the nation. These camps were also detention centers for inmates in transit before their transfer to the German authorities, at Gestapo Headquarters, in Paris or Lyon. In these camps, approximately 600,000 people were interned. These sites were in France (Lurs, Drancy, Noe, Argenteuil, Doullens, Argelès, Rivesaltes, Fortbarreau…) and in North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia). As Melville describes it in his film, the population of these camps was composed of multi-national, multi-ethnic, and anti-fascist individuals. Among this transnational and transcultural populace were Spanish, Jews, Germans (opposed to Nazism), French (Gaullists and other anti-Vichy), Communists, Gypsies, and Kabyle people.

Claude Levy, an author and biologist, referred to the existence of these camps in Ophuls’s documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity). Levy explains that the Vichy Regime jailed Jews, Spanish Republicans, Freemasons, and Gypsies in these camps. The testimony of Claude Levy is even more poignant when he describes the circumstance of his detention in one of them before being delivered to the Nazis and loaded in the “train de la mort” (Holocaust Train), on July 2, 1944. Claude Levy’s account removes the fiction from Melville’s film in establishing a connection with the harsh reality during the Nazi occupation.

In addition to the internment camps, Melville tells about the Gestapo and its interaction with captured resisters. Melville shows the torture and beating with Félix and Jean-François, two protagonists and members of Gerbier’s group. Both individuals, bloodied and lifeless, remained in their humid prison cells after their interrogation; their exit door was death.

This torture and demise were the fate of many resisters, as Nazis considered resistance “an illegal activity punishable by death.” Virginia d’Albert-Lake, in her memoir, tells about these treatments, as she had seen these petrified lifeless men in the Gestapo Headquarters at rue des Saussaies. Men were not the only victims of the Gestapo’s torture; women also experienced these atrocities. Virginia d’Albert-Lake tells in her memoir the case of her cellmate, a woman who spoke in French with a strong German accent; Gestapo suspended her for hours by one arm and a leg to the ceiling of the interrogation room. The Gestapo also administered deadly methods of interrogation to wounded members of the resistance whom they had captured as they attacked the counter-insurgents. This was the case of Commandant Max Menut’s wife, a French resister and wife of a resister. Wounded during an attack against the Wehrmacht in Auvergne, Anne-Mary was arrested and transferred to the Gestapo Headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand. There, the Gestapo interrogated her about her husband’s activities in the resistance, and they tortured her to obtain details of their activities in le maquis — she never revealed any secrets. In Ophuls’s documentary, Menut, emotionally moved, recollects the accounts of those who witnessed Anne-Mary’s torture. The henchmen of the Gestapo had buried her alive after she had collapsed in a coma, provoked by her injuries and sex mutilations. Again, these accounts of torture and death provide an accurate connection with the harsh reality of war and Melville’s film. These are clearly not a mythical misrepresentation.

Interestingly, Melville’s story about the resistance is not a unique phenomenon in post-war Europe. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, few film directors have produced works based on novels recollecting the years of war and the actions of the resistance. Similarly to Melville’s interpretation of Joseph Kessel’s work, the Dutch film director Paul Verhoeven found inspiration for his 1977 film Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange) in 1970 Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s autobiography Soldaat van Oranje. Although these two films are of a different cinematographic genre, these films depict a romanticized resistance in describing the harsh reality of life under the Nazi occupation. In comparing the historical context of these two films, the viewer understands the interactivity between memory and history in Melville’s film, the role of the film in the manipulation of memory in its socio-political context, and the consolidation of the myth of the French Resistance in the late 1960s.

In contrary to practices of management in occupied France, the Netherlands were not divided into two zones (occupied and free); however, similarly to France, the Netherlands still had a functioning civilian administration. Although France and the Netherlands have this component in common, the Dutch civilian administration was completely under the control of the Nazi occupiers. In other words, the Dutch population was under the control of collaborating administration that was acting from its homeland for the Nazi occupier rather than being under the jurisdiction of a totalitarian administration acting from an unoccupied zone of the nation, as it was the situation in France with the Government of Vichy.

Despite this different approach on the role of the civilian administration, the actions of the Gestapo were similar. In his film, Paul Verhoeven, in addition of showing the Gestapo’s poundings on prisoners during questionings like in Melville’s film, illustrates a larger set of tortures inflicted on the prisoners. These tortures consisted of water boarding and medical ill-treatments. Additionally, Verhoeven goes further in showing the psychological persecutions of the population through Gestapo’s tactics of intimidation, such as blackmail. The Gestapo aimed these mental persecutions to mislead prisoners in believing their friends had betrayed them. These practices permitted the Gestapo to acquire their expertise to infiltrate the resistance.

In his film, Verhoeven shows two cases of such exactions. One of the victims is Robby. He is the resistance radio operator whom the police subject to blackmail. Pressured under the fear that his Jewish fiancée might be deported to a concentration camp, Robby collaborated with the Nazi authorities. The other victim is Jan. He is a Jewish student who tries to flee to England at the beginning of the war. At first, the Gestapo seems nice and polite, but the manners of interrogation are increasingly physically and psychologically harsher. The Gestapo forces him to believe that agents in London have betrayed him. This subterfuge permits the Gestapo to gain Jan’s support to dismantle the resistance group in which he is active. The Gestapo engages in killing the members of the group as the Gestapo captures them.

Nonetheless, as Julian Jackson refers it in his book, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944, the Nazi occupiers had sealed the fate of the resisters with a decree of death sentence. Once more, Paul Verhoeven illustrates this fact in his movie. Jan and Robby die during the war; Jan faces the Nazi firing squad in the sand dunes, and a comrade resister, Guus, guns down Robby for his acts of treason. However, to mark the randomness with which men were sent to death or kept alive, Verhoeven shows that not all captive resisters were executed. Indeed, the Gestapo released some of them in hope to use them as bait to dismantle the resistance. In releasing the turncoats, the Gestapo hoped the resistance would kill them, giving the Nazis an opportunity to capture and kill the assassins. This was the case of another student, Erik, who claimed his innocence and non-participation in the resistance, although he was acquainted with the resistance and was active in it.

Although the mythical and heroic images exist — images showing the resistance incarnating the good and engaging itself in a struggle against the evil — in Dawn of Courage, Richard Fuegner conveys the reality of the tortures with the story of John Weidner. Weidner was a Dutch businessperson and a leader of one of the resistance networks. Weidner endured tortures during Gestapo’s interrogations — he was tied up, submerged in a tub filled with cold water, and beaten almost to death. After an extended time of questioning, the Gestapo released Weidner because he had been able to convince his torturers that he was innocent. The Gestapo re-arrested him later and sent him to a slave labor camp. Weidner’s story of multiple risky escapes and his resolution to survive demonstrates the Nazi eagerness to apply the death sentence in one-way or another. This account demonstrates the real interaction between the resisters and the occupiers in both France and Holland. Melville’s description of the Gestapo’s actions against the resistance was not a mere misrepresentation or a myth.

Nevertheless, according to Flore Plisnier, in Ils ont pris les armes pour Hitler, the best way for the Gestapo to eliminate the resistance was the use of paid informers and turncoat resisters who betrayed their friends and comrades-in-arms. Plisnier tells the circumstance of such acts of collaboration in insisting on the socio-economic factors that have led individuals to betray their fellow citizens. She explains the jealousy among people, but mostly the harsh economic conditions of the war, to include urban living conditions and lack of access to sufficient food sources, were the essential motives provoking these collaborating acts.

Although Plisnier tells about these paid informers and traitors in Belgium, it seems a similar phenomenon may have existed in the Netherlands and France. Indeed, Paul Verhoeven, in Soldaat van Oranje, shows a police officer paying a gardener, a man of an advanced age, for information on Guus, the oldest student. Verhoeven also includes, in his motion picture, elements referring to the betrayal of comrades-in-arms. This form of comrades-in-arms betrayal happens after Robby’s arrest by the Gestapo. Verhoeven tells the story of a radio operator who helped the Gestapo to apprehend resisters in sort of chain-reaction.

Although Fuegner, in Dawn of Courage, affirms the improbability of such collaboration because radio operators had access to cyanide pills, he confirms the disastrous effects such arrests had on the resistance in the Netherlands. Henry Schogt provides with another interpretation related to the lack of preparedness and readiness of the Dutch resistance to combat a well-organized and superior enemy. The combination of these different elements permits, however, to determine that the storyline in Paul Verhoeven’s film is quite close to the reality and that the dangers of capture and death of the resisters was not pure fiction.

Like Verhoeven, Jean-Pierre Melville narrates, in L’Armée des ombres, the story of a several traitors, Paul Dounat and Mathilde, and their tragedy — their assassination for the betrayal of their comrades-in-arms. The first one is name Paul Dounat. Convinced of Dounat’s betrayal, which had led to Gerbier’s arrest and imprisonment in one of Vichy’s camps, Gerbier and his clan organize the execution of the traitor in the suburbs of Marseilles. The second traitor is Mathilde, a woman, and a mother, who the Gestapo freed and assumedly trailed in hope to apprehend more resisters. Melville does not depict Mathilde as a traitor per se, but as a resister who would eventually talk and betray her comrades-in-arms. Gerbier’s clan, to avoid disastrous consequences, guns down Mathilde in broad daylight. Again, this is the same scenario and technique used by the Gestapo to eliminate its enemies. Both movies are referring to these police methods based on the reality of war, not the imagination of the novelists and film directors.

With his documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), Ophuls confirms the existence of these punitive actions against the traitors in the French resistance. The brothers Alexis and Louis Grave, although denying verbally having taken part to any execution parties, let the viewer understand they have in fact participated in such punitive actions against members of the resistance who turned to the enemy and betrayed their comrades-in-arms — their bodily expression reveals a suggested truth that denies their words. These facial expressions help convey Verhoeven’s and Melville’s films are not only fictions, but rather an art form allowing the telling of a story based on reality.

Fascinatingly, Melville’s film offers a great opportunity to study the relationship between memory, myth, and history. Panivong Norindr, an Associate Professor of French at the University of South California, argues in “Filmic Memorial and Colonial Blues” that French films dealing with historical period represent only an image and an appearance of the real. While referring to André Bazin’s description of the cinema as “the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real,” Norindr argues that these films are solely a social representation of likelihood, a pure phantasmal and mythical legitimization designed to fix and reconstruct the memory of the past; this memory offers only a specific perspective to the spectator. Although Norindr’s argument relates to colonial heritage in the 1990s, the writer finds this approach is essential for understanding the mechanics of the film and its influence on viewers.

Knowing that Melville’s film was released in French theaters at the end of 1969, the logical step, keeping Norindr’s argument in mind, would be to identify the specific perspective L’Armée des ombres attempts to express. According to scholars, les événements (the events) of May 1968 are a turning point in the history of France. The events symbolize a change in social and political behaviors in France. In addition, these events mark the end of Charles de Gaulle’s political career. Charles de Gaulle was the architect of the post-World War II France, the creator of the Fourth Republic and the Fifth Republic, the on and off supreme leader of the nation between 1940 and 1969, and the president of the French republic from 1958 to 1969. Charles de Gaulle experienced in mid-1968, during the riots of May 1968, a loss of political momentum, which resulted in his political downfall the following year. As a political figure for almost thirty years, Charles de Gaulle had dreamed of a glorious and unified France — a France he only knew from his readings and his social upcoming in the late nineteenth century. He worked in the post-war years to bring his dream to life, in attempting to glue back the segmented French society, torn by years of internal and external conflicts. In his endeavor to revive la. grandeur de la France — in politics, economics, and culture — and to stabilize the society, de Gaulle created, with his call to resistance on June 18, 1940, and his persona, the myth of the Resistance and promoted a specific image of France with the tools of his era, the cinema. Former resister, Gaullist at heart, and film director subjected to the censorship of the French government, Melville was one of Charles de Gaulle’s tools of propaganda.

Naomi Greene, in Landscapes of Loss, summarizes perfectly the role of cinema in France. She says, “This means that just as cinema lends it[s]elf to the expression of dreams, so, too, is it a powerful medium for the transmission of historical and political myths that, frequently, soften or obscure the most brutal or unpalatable of historical truths even as they give rise to compelling visions of the national past.” In other words, Greene explains that the cinematographic art is a tool of manipulation of memory with a mission. This mission is to invent an image of the past designed to stabilize an anxious and troubled society. It also uses a media allowing the repeated exposure of the audience for its indoctrination. Interestingly, Pierre Mendès-France, a former French officer, member of the Resistance, and former Prime Minister of France during the War in Indochina, in Ophuls’s documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié, recollects his passion for the cinematographic art during the war. While Mendès-France narrates his solitary existence as a fugitive, he mentions that motion pictures shown in theaters during the war were pure propaganda films, designed to indoctrinate viewers in believing a particular interpretation of the past within the present context. These films had a mission, the manipulation of memory to which Greene refers.

Although Greene does not refer to Hobsbawm’s concept, she clearly makes the use of it. Eric Hobsbawm, in The Invention of Tradition, articulates the principle of invention of tradition, which he links to an “attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.” Hobsbawm further describes the invention of tradition as the consolidation of social unity of a real or imagined community, the legitimization of the political authority, and the teaching of values through a process of repetition of certain images or symbols. The invention of tradition is the reconstruction of a past that fits the needs of the present. These concepts are indeed present in Melville’s film. They are the depiction of a strong unity and camaraderie within the ethnic and social diversity of the French Resistance, the engagement of its members in the political dilemma regarding the collaboration of France with Nazi Germany, and the devotion and altruistic sacrifice of men and women for their nation. With this concept, Melville’s L’Armée des ombres created a new image of the past in highlighting the solidarity of the entire French population, of diverse origins, in the face of hardship and struggle, at times of great anxiety. One sees the parallel between these anxieties in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s and during the events in the late 1960s.

Amazingly, as the reader understands that Melville’s film is supporting the creation of an image of the past modeled after de Gaulle’s dream of French grandeur, one remembers Melville’s interview in which he stated that his movie was mostly an image of the director’s own recollection of the war. Indeed, Melville had himself fought in the French Resistance, and his experience allowed him to elaborate on some details of the movies. Certainly, Melville’s experience of the war and the Resistance were different from every other member of the network and of the nation as a whole; yet, this experience was similar. In this manner, Melville’s memory of his personal experience and emotions influenced his image of the past and definitively modified the image of the French Resistance, contributing in turn to the consolidation of de Gaulle’s myth of the Resistance.

In his sociological work Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Maurice Halbwachs teaches that the collective memory helps maintaining a contemporary society in equilibrium and in unison with the socially and politically crafted image of the past. For Halbwachs, the collective memory emerges from the correlation between the personal memory, family memory, and social group memory and the social need for continuity,

Il n’en est pas moins vrai que la nécessité où sont les hommes de s’enfermer dans des groupes limités, famille, groupe religieux, classe sociale (pour ne parler que de ceux-ci), bien que moins inéluctable et moins fatale que la nécessité d’être enfermé dans une durée de vie déterminée, s’oppose au besoin social d’unité, au même titre que celle-ci au besoin social de continuité.

In turn, the collective memory gives a sense of societal belonging in creating a socio-cultural identity that permits a social equilibrium while experiencing a change of environment.

Alison Landsberg, in Prosthetic Memory, addresses the role of mass culture, and of cinema, on the creation of a type of memory she labels prosthetic memory. Using Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory, Landsberg argues that the prosthetic memory emerges from the interaction of people with visual narratives of a past they did not personally and physically experience in arguing that it is “possible to experience an event or a past without having actually lived through it.” In other words, having not lived and experienced directly the past, and therefore having no collective memory of that past, the viewers create an alternative form of memory in watching these re-created images of the past. For Landsberg, this interaction generates an emotional response and, therefore, a lived experience. This experience, although only emotional, in turn creates a subjective memory of the visually narrated past, which is tainted with contemporary collective memory. Landsberg posits in her argument that cinema is a tool permitting for a social response and a political engagement of a given society. In turn, Landsberg claims this subjective memory helps model the social and cultural identity from the re-created prosthetic collective memory.

With Halbwachs and Landsberg’s concepts, the reader understands the use of cinema in contemporary society and its role in the late 1960s. In creating a visual emotion, a motion picture creates collective memories, which essentially bring comfort to a society living in the anxiety of modernity and in the torment of social awakening and struggle. With these concepts, the reader comprehends the function of Melville’s film in producing a re-assuring image of the French society after May 1968, in promoting a certain image of the past of France. This image is also reflecting Charles de Gaulle’s politics of grandeur and glory.

Yi-Fu Tuan, in Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, tells the reader that other elements influence memory. They are the emotional and the sensorial experiences of location and landscape. For Tuan, these experiences affect memory in freezing it in time and in space. These temporal and special fixations transform the emotional and sensorial experiences into objects. For Tuan, “Objects anchor time.” This objectification turns these experiences into concrete experiences, at both personal and collective level. This is particularly true with the cinema. Tuan further specifies that with these objectified images, fixed in space and time, individuals can easily access their memory of the depicted past, and they can identify with them. This access to memory, in turn, produces a sense of origin and roots for individuals living in a fast moving society. Looking back at the events of May 1968, the reader sees the rapid change of French society. Therefore, Tuan tells the reader that the objectification of memory in time and space promotes the stability of society. Melville’s film provides these elements in telling a story of the French past — of the French Resistance — and the images permit to fix the time and space in the collective memory. These images affixed in space and time become place or realm of memory, otherwise known as Pierre Nora’s precept of Lieux de mémoire.

In other words, historical films, like Melville’s L’Armée des ombres, are an invented collective memory based on a realm of memory. For Pierre Nora, an image is a symbol of a disappeared past. Returning to the Melville’s film, the director imposed, in 1969, an image of the French Resistance, colored by his personal experience. Melville’s goal was to shape a political image, a positive image, an image of the greatness of France, in accordance to Charles de Gaulle’s dream, during one of the darkest moments in French history, the socio-cultural revolution of May 1968. The purpose of Melville’s films was to capture in time and space, and safeguard the rest of a lost past. According to Nora, capturing the past is not the only aspect to create a lieu, but to affix that lost past one must establish a ritual of memorialization or of commemoration. This ritual effectively stops, according to Nora, the passing of time and the subsequent erosion of memory, it is “de bloquer le travail de l’oubli [to block the work of forgetting].” In other terms, the ritualization creates a master symbol for the lost memory, and it objectifies it. Like Tuan, Nora promotes the objectification of the lost collective memory to fix the latter in places, in objects, like motion pictures, to prevent the loss of memory. Furthermore, the nature of the motion picture permits Nora’s ritualization of the sacred image or symbol: the replay of movies is the ritual, the memorialization.

In the case of L’Armée des ombres, the memorialization is the institutional transformation of Melville’s personal memory into a collective and prosthetic memory, through his film and through the transformation of his film into a memorial, sanctioned by Charles de Gaulle. Although Melville’s L’Armée des ombres is a romanticized and fictional story, it is a story, which attempts to provide a response or a satisfactory explanation about the myth of the French Resistance, and which is most likely fulfilling a function designed to provide a platform for social unity in presenting a preconceived image. Melville’s film fulfills this function under and after Charles de Gaulle.

The analysis in this paper shows the interactivity of many concepts related to the interface between memory and history in showing how a particular present — the socio-political situation in France at the release of Melville’s movie in theaters in 1969 —interacts with the presentation of a historical interpretation of the past that is influenced by Melville’s own memory and by the conservative political ends of the Gaullist movement. In interpreting the concepts by Maurice Halbwachs’s Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Eric Hobsbawm’s The Invention of Tradition, Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de mémoire, Alison Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory, and Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, scholars clearly understand the complex concepts at play in the analysis of Melville’s film. These concepts permit a deeper comprehension of L’Armée des ombres and the historical context of its creation and its release on theater screens throughout France, in 1969. Melville’s film finds its purpose in consolidating Charles de Gaulle’s myth of the Resistance at a crucial moment in time when it was necessary to provide platform for social unity, coherence, and stability during times of deep socio-politico-economic troubles. Although this film is about the myth of the Resistance, the depiction of the reality of life during the years of Nazi occupation proves that Melville did not imagine most of his film. With these hints of historically correctness, Melville’s film is certainly a memorial honoring the men and women who sacrificed their lives for France. With this fresco, Melville did not only show his version of the myth, but he showed the May 1968’s generation that men like Charles de Gaulle where essential for France and its role in the world. Thinking of Melville’s film screening in the USA in 2006, one may wonder the reasons for the release of the movie some forty years after its initial screening in France. Should one see a necessity for the creation of a prosthetic memory in a different geo-political environment? Yet, this is another story!


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Gaetan Carpentier, M.A.

Written by

Public Historian, Oral Historian, Public Servant, Veteran, and Rancher.

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