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L2: WW2 & the Historians: Libération 1

The Liberation : myths and history

Perhaps more than any other aspect of the Second World War, the Libération was the subject of myth-making, at the time and subsequently. This should not surprise us. Contemoraries were conscious of living an historic moment, one that seemed like the reversal of the verdict of 1940. For those in the Resistance or the Free French, it was an apotheosis. For their antagonists, collaborating directly with the Germans (the French fascists) or supporters of , it was a nemesis. For everyone, it raised the alternatives of whether this was the end of a bitterly divisive parenthesis and a return to normality or the start of a radically new phase in French history, perhaps even a revolution of sorts. Wherever one stood, the stakes could not have been higher. So it is no wonder that historical meaning was imparted to the Libération at the time and afterwards by politicians and others. The question for us is what sense have historians made of the Libération, whether as part of this broader ascription of meaning to the end of the Occupation or independently of it.

The more or less instantaneous myth-making is evidenced by de Gaulle’s speech with which we began course, suggesting central idea of ‘self-liberation’, and also the PCF emerging from clandestinity with image of the FFI as a kind of popular unrising, incarnating justice against the collaborators. Chronologically, the Libération was spread over ten months, from June 1944 to May 1945. But the epicentre was July-August 1944, once the Allies broke out of the beacheads and also landed in Provence. Symbolized by . Cf. images in contemporary text, Pierre Maudru, Les Six Glorieuses de Paris (1944). See document package.

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1. The épuration (purges). Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the Libération for contemporaries and for the subsequent myth-histories was the purges - l’épuration. This covers a variety of phenomena - summary justice against presumed collaborators, popular and then (very quickly) formally instated tribunals, the high profile trials of Pétain and Laval in 1945 (with the latter’s execution), and the purging of various aspects of French life, including the state administration, the press, intellectuals and the world of business. It was at this point that Renault was nationalized, not through economic doctrine but because of Louis Renault’s willing cooperation with the German armaments effort.

The épuration was important ultimately because it went to the heart of the judgements made at the time about the complicity of French men and women (as well as of the Vichy regime) with the German occupation - and as such it had both a moral and a judicial dimension. As an integral component of the Libération, it posed the issue of how to judge the entire episode since 1940 which subsequently lay at the heart of the historical verdicts delivered by professional historians and many others on the same question. It is this dimension that I want to discuss in this lecture - the Libération not just as an epic narrative (told in different ways) - though that is part of it - but also as a moral and legal verdict on what had preceded it.

Precisely because the épuration was a kind of judgement, it was almost immediately the subject of wildly differing appreciations. In fact, there was consensus among all the groups represented in the Provisional Government (issued from the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale (CFLN)) on the need for restraint in the purges, including trials and death sentences. The consensus extended to the Communists. De Gaulle in particular argued in speech on 8 October 1944 that leniency L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 3

was required in order to reassure Allies, help get the country working on reconstruction, and mount a national war effort. This consensus was not necessarily shared by Resistance groups locally - who were frequently appalled to see so many of those accused pardoned or let off with light sentences.1 Of course, to those likely to find themselves before a court, it might seem too harsh by far.

In particular, the fear by many Vichyistes and some currents of Allied opinion that the Communists represented a revolutionary threat (which they did not, owing to orders from Moscow apart from anything else), and that they were using the situation to conduct class warfare, resulted in the myth of a savage épuration. The Nazi press claimed in September 1944 that 9,000 executions had been carried out in Paris alone. In 1946, with the PCF now in government, a conservative American paper, the American Mercury, reported that the Communists had executed 50,000 people just in the south-east. These accounts equated the épuration to a revolutionary terror, expressing a counter-revolutionary fear nourished by a long tradition of vilifying the left as bloody barbarians (the Paris Commune of 1871, the Bolshevik Revolution). As we have seen, , who was both ultra-supportive of de Gaulle but also relatively indulgent towards Pétain, presented the Communists and revolutionary civil war as the real menace in his Histoire de la Libération (1959). He claimed that 30 - 40,000 executions had been carried out - a figure he maintained in his Histoire de l’Epuration (1967). We saw that de Gaulle felt obliged to correct him on this point with a figure of 10,842 in vol. 3 of his War Memoirs (1959).

Careful work by an American contemporary of Paxton, Peter Novick (1968), confirmed the accuracy of official inquires conducted just after the war on which de Gaulle had based his total. In reality, between 9 and 10,000 executions occurred, but L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 4

over half of these took place before the Allied landings i.e. under the Occupation. Between 3,700 and 4,500 is the true figure of executions at the Libération, about 3/4 of them summary and 1/4 after due process.2 The actual level of retribution by execution was relatively low, and for many had not gone nearly far enough.

2. The status of the Liberation as a legal judgement on Collaboration. The épuration was thus limited at least as far as the death sentence is concerned. In other regards, the purges were quite substantial (e.g. a large proportion of prefects were eliminated from office). However, from the late 1940s, with the PCF now in the political wilderness and conservatives increasingly rehabilitated in the context of the , many of those purged, imprisoned or stripped of their civic rights found themselves reinstated, released from prison and restored to their full status as citizens. This was the beginning of process of retrospective simplification and amnesia over which the myth histories of and presided.

Nonetheless, as Henry Rousso argued in The Vichy Syndrome, the earlier period, from the Libération to the early 1950s, was not one in which the complexities of Vichy and the Occupation were ignored. How could they be, in what he rightly terms a period of ‘uncompleted mourning’? What did the Provisional Government and restored legitimacy of the Republic actually do at the Libération to condemn the Vichy regime, its works and its relationship with the Germans? In addition to taking over and moderating the épuration, the Provisional Government, even before arriving in Paris, issued two fundamental decrees on 9 August 1944. The first declared that: ‘The form of government in France is, and remains, the Republic. Legally, the latter has never ceased to exist’. The second declared all constitutional, legislative and administrative acts of Vichy to be null and void because the latter, supplanting the Republic, was L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 5

illegitimate. It was by virtue of this doctrine that de Gaulle declined to declare the Republic in Paris on 26 August 1944, observing that it had never ceased to exist. The legal and constitiutional repudiation of Vichy could not be clearer.

However, once the myth-histories disintegrated as a result of their own inabiliity to deal with the complexity and above all the diversity of experiences during the Occupation, new histories emerged clamouring for recognition and projecting doubt, anxiety and national introspection where once there had been relative clarity. Inevitably, the question arose of whether the moral and legal judgement on Vichy reached during the Libération was now adequate, or whether it needed to be re-done - and differently.

The trials and retrials in the 1990s of individuals who had held positions of authority in Vichy (Bousquet, Touvier, Papon) can be seen as just this - a second wave of legal process, fifty years later, made possible by the 1964 law ending the statute of limitations on ‘’. And as we have seen, it was the specificity of Jewish experience in France (as elsewhere) - a specificity that had simply been swept under the consensual carpet in 1944-45 and by the Gaullist and Communist myth histories - which was at the heart of this drive to judge the past differently. The issue surfaced with particular force in the celebrated demand for an official commemoration of the round-up of the Vél. d’Hiv. As you will recall, this concerned the mass arrest on 16- 17 July 1942 of 13,152 (3,118 men, 5,919 women, and 4,115 children) by the French police as a result of the Bousquet-Oberg accords (Bousquet as Vichy chief of police, Karl Oberg as head of the SS and German police for Occupied France). Virtually all those arrested - whole families among them - perished in .

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In 1992, an ad hoc committee of French Jews published a petition asking the President of the Republic to recognize officially that ‘the French state of Vichy’ had been guilty of ‘persecutions and crimes against the Jews of France’. The figure of the 75,000 who perished during the war was mentioned. What drove this demand was the overwhelming feeling that the enormity of the Holocaust and Vichy’s role in it had been absent from the national narrative of the Second World War. However, the petition proved controversial not only because François Mitterand refused to make the declaration requested, but also because some journalists and historians, and notably Henry Rousso, criticized the petition (though initially having acted as consultant to it) on the grounds that what it called for was both a-historical and of doubtful judicial validity.

As Rousso and the journalist Eric Conan explain it in chapter 2 of their book on the debate over Vichy, the problem was firstly that the petition unfairly discredited the épuration by pretending that only ‘a few senior figures at Vichy’ had been tried in 1945, whereas the process was much more far-reaching. But even more importantly, by demanding that the President of the Republic repudiate the actions of Vichy, the petition presumed historical continuity between Vichy and the Fifth Republic such that the president was in a position to issue what amounted to an apology on behalf of the ‘French state’. This was to ignore, or worse to reject, the fundamental decrees of 9 August 1944, which repudiated all the acts of a regime which legally had never existed. In fact, it amounted to a renunciation of the entire constittutional foundation of post-war France. It was, to use Rousso and Conan’s expression, an attempt by a ‘new generation’ to rewrite the history of 1945 with the ’mentalities’ of 1992.

The force of the argument that an unrecognized moral claim could not be rectified by falsifying the historical record of the Libération or by riding roughshod over the legal L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 7

repudiation of Vichy is a powerful one. Yet Conan and Rousso perhaps unfairly dismiss the ‘new generation’ as not really understanding the realities of 1945. For many of the group were children during the war, might themselves have been deported in the Vél d’Hiv. round-up, and had family who were. It was the specificity of their personal and familial memories that they proclaimed, and the simplifying myth-histories that allowed such memories little space which they attacked. The outpouring of historical scholarship on that experience in the intervening period (we have seen Paxton and Marrus’ book and the historical work of Serge Klarsfeld) was not enough to assuage the memory. Other forms of historical - and legal reparation - were demanded. This came in degrees as16 July was made a ‘national day of commemoration’ and in 2002, something akin to the apology demanded of Mitterand was delivered by Chirac. Both the importance - and the limits - of historical scholarship are evident in this attempt to rewrite the Libération.

3. Historians and the Libération: the perspectives of cultural and gender history. Central though the moral and legal dimensions have been to professional historians and to broader public understanding of the event, the Libération, precisely because it was both an apotheosis for the Resistance and a moment of transition that closed the bitterly divisive four years of the Occupation, had many other dimensions. In the last ten to fifteen years, these have attracted the attention of historians who have used a variety of approaches, many of them rooted in cultural history, to constitute them as historical subjects and study them. Just as the Paxton ‘revolution’ brought complexity and diversity to the Vichy regime, and the work of historians like Roderick Kedward has done the same for the Resistance, it is not surprising if these concerns have been applied to the Libération where the histories of Vichy and Resistance intersect and end.

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A good example of some of the new approaches used is contained in the volume edited by Roderick Kedward and Nancy Wood, The . Image and Event (1995). As the title suggests, the subject is both experience and its representation in a variety of forms, including films, literature and politics - and in this it is very different from the more traditional narrative and political histories (e.g. that of Robert Aron). Kedward’s own introduction (‘Ici commence la France libre’) provides a good insight into the approaches used. He explores just what ‘France libre’ and ‘France libérée’ meant as an idea, as an event, and as a specific place and time in various parts of France. He suggests that while it was infinitely different in its local variety, liberation was also imagined as a unitary narrative at the national level - and had to be, since it was a question of ending an episode and reconstructing a sense of national community.

‘Liberation of French territory in 1944 is therefore pluralistic but unitary; its relative chronology, as a series of local events, is symbolically represented as the Liberation of France. However atomized or localized, the Resistance never really imaged itself in any other way.’3

Yet the relationship also worked in the other direction. However much unitary narratives of triumphant liberation were used to present Libération as the apotheosis of Resistance, the actual events (in all their diversity) were marked by ambiguities (an end or a beginning? liberation from more than Vichy?) and by moral questions bound up with the épuration , which made the whole episode in reality much more problematic. One conceptual tool proposed by Kedward to account for these ambiguities, and for the gaps between discourse and image on the one hand and outcome on the other, is that of ‘carnival’. Carnival, of course, is the traditional use of celebration and ritual in extraordinary moments to turn ‘the world upside down’ - the better, of course, to restore it to rights subsequently. The hopes and liberational aspirations of many of the Resisters, on this reading, infused the Libération with much of its mood and many of its L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 9

rituals before the realities of political continuities or restorations marked its closure. Carnival becomes a way of recognizing the strength and enthusiasm of that liberational moment, especially for those who over four years and at the risk of their lives, had joined the Resistance, without simply condeming it by subsequent disillusionment or accusing the Resistance of hypocrisy. Kedward sees the Libération as both a failure of the promise of Resistance in the wider picture but also an extraordinary moment that has to be recaptured outside the myth-histories and understood in its own terms.

Among the works which have tried precisely to restore the cultural substance to Libération is one by Fabrice Virgili, which focuses on a long-known but little-analyzed aspect of the Libération, the humiliation of women reputed to have collaborated with the Germans, especially by having sexual relations with them, by the ritual shaving of their hair, usually in public.4 Although familiar from photographs and some treatment in film, the phenomenon had not been analyzed by historians, partly because the terms of such an analysis required a deeply critical perspective on the Libération, but also one which could employ concepts and approaches capable of restoring the complexity of this aspect of ‘popular justice’ and of accounting for it.

By investigating departmental archives across the country, Virgili was able to establish the scale of head-shaving, which, even if it varied considerably in intensity, was present virtually everywhere, from Paris to the remotest areas of the southern zone, totaling in exess of 20,000 cases. Virtually all these punishments took place publicly, typically in the town or village square, or in front of the town hall. Surprisingly, under half were explicitly related to accusations of sexual collaboration. In other cases (indeterminate, economic collaboration, having denounced people to Vichy or the Germans), women were punished sexually for non-sexual transgressions. L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 10

How to account for this? Virgili considers, but rejects, Kedward’s notion of ‘carnival’ since head-shaving was not an interim celebration – the world turned upside down – before a return to normality and the authority structures. It was done with the support of the new (Liberation) authorities as part of the transition to the post-war order. However, he does find strong evidence of traditional rituals of popular morality (e.g. the charivari) and precedents – shaving women’s heads for disapproved of sexual liaisons occurred after World War I and of course women’s hair has powerful gendered significance. Ultimately, however, Virgili finds a major cause in terms of masculinity – or more precisely, in the restoration of what he terms ‘a virile France’. After the humiliation of French manhood in 1940, the Resistance can be understood partly as a reassertion of masculine values (c.f. paradox of ‘femininity’ of Vichy’s relationship with Germans despite its overt paternalism). Of course, women profoundly involved in Resistance. But that was downplayed – and in the final phase of the insurrection after D-Day, gendered distinctions were more strongly reasserted through the FFI and its role. In this view, the épuration becomes a reaffirmation of French masculinity, and the humiliation of women in explicitly sexual and gendered terms is a means of achieving that – whether or not the alleged collaboration had been sexual in nature or not. The thesis is an interesting, and inherently convincing one. But it could scarcely have been formulated prior to second-wave feminism and the extenson of gender studies to the analysis of masculinities as well as femininities – which was a product of the 1990s.

* * *

Liberation as especially interesting site of construction of historical meaning, because public actors as well as historians. L2: WW2 France & the Historians: Libération 11

John Horne, November 2014

1 Jean-Pierre Rioux, ‘L’Epuration en France’ in Etudes sur la France de 1939 à nos jours (1985), pp. 162-77 (164).

2 Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy. The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (NY, 1968).

3 H. R. Kedward and Nancy Wood (eds.), The Liberation of France. Image and Event (1995), p. 2.

4 Fabrice Virgili, Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (2000; English tr., 2002).