What The Hell America!

Multiple small groups, shot through with various political standpoints, stepped into the breach left by the collapse of the nation’s institutions and parties, in defiance of Nazi occupation and the collaboration of the Vichy regime led by Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Resistance involved refugees, political exiles, Jews, and veterans of struggles like the Spanish Civil War. It took many forms: gathering intelligence, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, or sheltering refugees and Allied service personnel and helping them across borders.

Bourdet wrote of his experience of resistance within France as something far removed from elitist or idealist readings of history. It was a movement that developed independently of Charles de Gaulle and the Free French forces based in London:

No doubt it was difficult, from London, to understand the unexpected nature of the problems faced by the Resistance. We ourselves discovered the nature and scale of the task bit by bit, empirically. To have imagined it, without living it every day, would have required a wide-ranging political culture, to have studied the history of revolutions, to more or less understand the meaning of revolutionary action. This was not the case with De Gaulle, nor the men who surrounded him.

The hopes of the protagonists for what kind of society might emerge after the liberation were to be submerged by the reassertion of preexisting economic and social relations. Their own history also began to be retold.

By 1942, much of Europe had proven incapable of defending its territory against Nazi invasion. After the war, national credibility had to be rebuilt if these states were to survive. A feature of this process in France was the creation of a resistance myth that downplayed the extent of collaboration and emphasized resistance as an expression of the “true” values of the nation.

It did not take long for gaps between this myth and the harsh realities of the postwar order to emerge. On VE Day itself, as De Gaulle spoke about the triumph of “justice and liberty,” French troops in Algeria were repressing a demonstration in the Algerian town of Sétif as marchers celebrated victory over the Nazis and the prospect of independence from French occupation. Over the next few weeks, tens of thousands of Algerians were massacred in brutal reprisals against violence inflicted on European settlers.

By the time of the Algerian War of Independence from 1954 onward, French generals like Raoul Salan, veterans of the liberation of France, were overseeing the systematic use of torture. Their brutality drew comparisons with the Gestapo.

A huge number of historical studies have illuminated the complexity of choices facing individuals during the occupation, enriching our understanding of collaboration and resistance. But the incorporation of resistance into a “national narrative” has often obscured the conflicts and dilemmas that characterized the reality of the struggle against Nazi occupation.

This has resulted in a simplified view of key resistance figures like Jean Moulin. Sometimes it has led to the trivialization or distortion of the resistance legacy.

In February 2024, the coffin of Missak Manouchian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide executed by the Nazis in February 1944, was transferred to the Pantheon in Paris along with the remains of his widow, Mélinée, who fought alongside him.

Manouchian was a Communist. He led a resistance group made up of immigrant combatants. Twice refused French citizenship in his lifetime, he died stateless.

Present at the ceremony was the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), Marine Le Pen. To add insult to injury, she drew a grotesque parallel between immigrant resisters like Manouchian and the members of France’s Foreign Legion, with which she had “family connections.” In fact, her father, Jean-Marie, was a Foreign Legion officer in Indochina and Algeria, where he fought alongside former SS officers and tortured prisoners in Algiers.

Le Pen’s party was built by wartime collaborators and ex-Waffen SS officers along with their postwar acolytes. The man who drew up its first economic program was Pierre Gérard, a former official in Vichy’s deeply antisemitic Jewish Affairs Commission, whose responsibilities included the “economic Aryanization” of French territory.

Since its defeat in 1945, the French far right has been able to regenerate itself. In doing so, it has rehabilitated ideas that might have seemed buried at the liberation. This process has taken many decades. It has been carried out consciously and deliberately.

The RN won the biggest share of the vote in the 2024 parliamentary elections. Its deputies stood on a platform calling for the removal of basic rights from foreigners living in France.

Le Pen’s presence at a service commemorating a Communist immigrant who lost his life fighting the Nazis was not just an insult to the Resistance and all those who said no. It underlines how much this legacy and its lessons matter today.