Throughout my life, I’ve received from American pop culture two basic, contradictory images of the French Resistance:
1. As a heroic vanguard that represented the will of the French people as a whole in defying Nazi oppression.
2. As an unrepresentative minority whose heroic myth provided a cover for the craven collaboration of the French people as a whole.
(This latter being especially popular in the lead-up to and early days of the Iraq War.) Olivier Wieviorka’s The French Resistance, now out from Harvard University’s Belknap Press in Jane Marie Todd’s English translation, complicates both pictures. I’m currently working my way through his vast account, which is unabashedly not a popular history, but a synthesis of existing research into the Byzantine, mutating infrastructure of the Resistance.
As an Internet headline would put it, what he finds might surprise you: that the revered General De Gaulle, for instance, was often on bad terms both with his sponsors in London and with the partisans back home. Or that the head of the R.A.F. refused point-blank at one point to air-drop French guerillas back into France. Wieviorka is particularly good on the collaborator Marshal Pétain, postulating that at least some of the French support for him and his Vichy regime came from the popular belief—however counterintuitive—that he was playing a “long game” against the Germans, only biding his time before switching sides to the Resistance. He also shows that the elite of the Resistance did not, as is often assumed, become the elite of postwar France, and the “army of shadows” was actually a crazy-quilt of often discordant, only gradually unified factions. The one thing Wieviorka is short on is of exciting stories of individual missions and acts of courage, but his rigorous analysis, widely acclaimed in his own country, should do a lot in America to clear away myths both of Resistance superheroes and of cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
