One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in the Unfree French

Paul Fischer

9/10/2017

Professor Zdatny

One Thousand Pieces of a National Drama in The Unfree French

Contemporary historians struggle to piece together the dramatic events that unfolded in France during the German occupation of World War II. There are a number of grounded facts that make analysis difficult, even contradictory, in practice. Ranging from former occupation to censorship such empirically founded agents of complexity are disambiguated in The Unfree French by Richard Vinen from the distinctly political and deliberate upheaval of institutions, persons, and property in France that occurred. Rather than dwelling on the tragedies in the course of war or the jubilation of victory and resistance, Vinen successfully navigates the integral developments through the war making a perplexing narrative tangible to modern historians.

The presence and widespread impact of prisoners of war in Germany and France blurs the lines between these two narratives; a political narrative was initiated in the hearts of every Frenchman, and stuck in the gut of the Frenchwoman as well (373-5). Uncertainty became a critical theme in this narrative early in the war, and though “it was probably in the bitter cold of January of 1941 that most prisoners finally accepted there was not going to be a large scale release” and that no orders to escape existed as for British soldiers, massive numbers managed to escape from early internment camps (157). On the countryside, both the confusion and the determination to serve France manifested in the panic of the exode.

While a popular film depicting the era, The Last Metro, includes a dialogue in which a woman refuses the implications of an agent of the censor by excusing herself as non-political to which he replies, “but you are wrong, everything is political,” the integral nature of politics to the era is matched by social considerations. Integrity of cached events deliberated through subsequent hunting is best reflected by the opinions of the survivors: “French people recalled the period in terms of what happened to them and those around them, the idea that these multitudes of individual dramas were part of a broader national drama only developed later” (16). The Unfree French succeeds in bringing this social collection of considerable import to political immediacy.

Intractability of the course of action of Vichy France cannot be dismissed as in the words of Bénoit-Méchin “the crowd possesses no organ for thought. Victim of its mental hallucinations and its nervous reactions, it is without defence against rumours and delirious dreams” (94). As much as silence defined the government of Pétain, and the subsequent Pétainism that dominated the colonies, circumstance dictated the actions of the individual French (31, 75). This occurred heroically, as one woman pinned a yellow star to her dog and others donned the symbol in protest though “gentiles who wore the yellow star were often themselves in some doubt about the precise significance of their act” (140). Even Marshall Pétain used the murky nature of the Franco-German occupation in a manner bordering on heroism, declaring to the Germans “if it would take you five days to invade France, it would take me five minutes to deliver my colonies and ships to Great Britain” (81).

The tale is not only one of gangsters and murder, of treaties and betrayal. There is also the final defeat of Germany, and the restoration of France. With the exception of some of the bourgeouisie, almost none found German occupation preferable to the Allied invasion: “Where the Germans had been systematically ruthless with the population, the Allies were confused and tactless” (331). Exposing the system of agents, censorship, and oppression that were in play in occupied territories through World War II helps an understanding of the formal initiation of military operations and of the subsequent blood bath to be formulated. 250,000 Gypsies in France were killed, as were 75,000 Jews. While death camp activity was lower among French citizens than many parts of Europe, and “Vichy aimed to exclude Jews from public life rather than to kill,” foreign born Jews in France suffered near complete extermination, and the highest kill rates of any civilian population in Europe was seen there (136).