FRENCH 232 Occupation and Resistance
(In English)

Few experiences in recent French history have marked French collective memory as profoundly as the Second World War. During these years, the French dealt not only with the trauma of defeat and the German Occupation, but also with the divisive legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime, headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, a revered World War I hero. Memories of the war have continued to mark the public imagination to the present day, manifesting themselves in the various arenas of French national life. This course examines the history and memory of the French experience of World War II through historical documents, memoirs, films, literature, and songs. 

In the aftermath of the war, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French forces, promulgated a myth of a resistant France united against a common foreign enemy, thereby repressing the reality of both the collaboration and the resistance. Only during the 1970s was this “resistancialist” myth exploded by a new generation of French men and women seeking to ascertain the reality of the French experience during the war years. Memories of the war have thus continued to mark the public imagination, manifesting themselves in the various arenas of French national life, among them, the cinema and television, fiction, and memoirs, as well as in public debates concerning commemorations and war trials.

The first few weeks of the course are devoted to the history of the French experience during the war, from the beginning of hostilities in 1939 to the Liberation; subsequently, we will examine the memory of the war to the present day. We will thus study a variety of documents, historical as well as contemporary, including speeches, propaganda tracts, memoirs, newspaper articles, literary texts, films and songs. 

Readings:
Charles de Gaulle and Philippe Pétain, speeches
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Paris during the Occupation,” “Portrait of a collaborator”
Robert Brasillach, Before the War (excerpts)
Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat (excerpts)
Albert Camus, “Letters to a German friend” and selections from Combat, perhaps a short excerpt from The Plague
Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo (excerpts)
Irène Nemirovsky,  Suite Française (excerpts)
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After (excerpts)

Secondary texts (excerpts from the following):
Philippe Burin, “Vichy” in Pierre Nora, ed. Les Lieux de mémoire
Richard Golsan, Vichy's Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France
Richard Golsan, ed. Memory, the Holocaust and French Justice: The Bousquet and Touvier Affairs
Julian Jackson, France: the Dark Years, 1940-1944
Alice Kaplan, The Collaborator
Robert Paxton, Vichy France
Robert Paxton and Michael Marrus, Vichy France and the Jews
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome
Henry Rousso and Eric Conan, Vichy: An Ever-Present Past
Andrew Shennan, The Fall of France
Susan Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War

Films:
Marcel Ophuls, 1971, The Sorrow and the Pity
Louis Malle, 1974, Lacombe Lucien
Claude Berri 1990, Uranus
Claude Chabrol, 1993, The Eye of Vichy
Claude Berri, 1997, Lucie Aubrac
Mathieu Kassovitz (1996), A Self-Made Hero

Other possibilities:
Alain Resnais, 1956, Night and Fog
Bertrand Tavernier, 2001, Laissez-passer or François Truffaut, 1980, Le Dernier Métro
Pierre Sauvage, 1989, Weapons of the Spirit
Clouzot, 1943, Le Corbeau (The  Raven)