Fighters in the Shadows
By Robert Gildea
Belknap/Harvard, 593 pages, $35
There is no more complicated tale of World War II in Europe than how the French performed during the German victory over and occupation of their nation, a period they still recall as “the dark years.” Robert Gildea’s “Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance” deftly tells us why.
The occupation (1940-45) is one of the three events, along with the great Revolution (1789-99) and the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), that continue to haunt and inflect modern French politics and history. All three were defined by real or near civil war, international repercussions, exhausting family divisions, and examples of intellectual and moral courage and cowardice. Still vivid in many living memories, France’s actions during the war have produced many books over the past decade alone, most notably Olivier Wieviorka’s “Histoire de la Résistance, 1940-1945” and Matthew Cobb’s “The Resistance: The French Fight Against the Nazis.” They seek answers to the same question: “How effective was the French resistance to the German occupation of their country?” And the varied conclusions are more often than not hedged, for the complete story continues to unwind.
Mr. Gildea is among the best historians writing today about French identity, and specifically about how France’s national myths have been re-formed over the past 75 years. His earlier work “Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France During the German Occupation” (2002) illuminated the subtleties of what it was like to live under military and police control, balanced between fear and hope. “Fighters in the Shadows” expands on his earlier thesis that “the monolithic concept of les années noires needs to be nuanced.” This new book posits that the quarrels between French communists and the Free French, between those who stayed in France and those who left, coupled with the Shoah’s horror and the tragic destiny of the other déportés, have tended to marginalize quieter stories, ones that can still provide color and perspective to that period. Mr. Gildea believes that, for the sake of a more transparent memory of morally complex times, these accounts, though they may be “less appealing to contemporary audiences,” should be heard.
His compellingly detailed—and lengthy—book brings forth the testimonies of many résistants and résistantes that have been gathering dust in archives, in museums, in forgotten memoirs and in the memories of still living actors in the drama. He has done a daunting amount of research, ranging from an almost archaeological fascination with the layers of myth surrounding the meaning of “resistance” to compassionate interviews with survivors and their descendants. “Fighters in the Shadows” gives us a cacophony of voices, subtly orchestrated by a historian who loves France, yet one who respects historical objectivity.
If there is a main character in the book, it is, of course, the politically astute and strongly idiosyncratic Charles de Gaulle. It was de Gaulle who sold the world on the postwar fantasy that France had been freed by a combination of insurrectional patriots and a revivified Free French Army. By the end of the war, he had—unbelievably—succeeded in bringing France back into the Allied fold, despite its having been the sole ally to have collaborated with the Germans. Thus did he ensure that France was one of the occupying powers of a defeated Germany. He later argued successfully for his nation to be a permanent member of the new United Nations Security Council. Against his strategies, we find, were everyone from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Frenchmen who did not trust his political goals. Mr. Gildea reminds us repeatedly that, while le grand Charles was planning this postwar strategy, he was doggedly, from June 1940 until after D-Day, attempting to control internal French resistance groups, especially the communists.
While maintaining a bird’s-eye view of this complicated period, Mr. Gildea persistently focuses on dozens of personal observations, placing them within the history of the divisions of the French body politic. He revives and enlivens memories that have remained in a collective amnesia: the substantive role of immigrants, political exiles, Jews, Poles, Russians, Germans and Spaniards in the vigorous opposition to the Germans in France. His history is “new” in that it projects light onto the unrewarded, the purposefully ignored and the politically inconvenient (e.g., communists) who often fought more courageously for France than many of its own citizens. At a symposium in 1974, one Frenchman remembered how he and other youngsters fanned out to warn Jews of an impending raid: “With leaflets and words we went from neighborhood to neighborhood, street to street, house to house, floor to floor, door to door, to warn people of the danger that was closing in. If 14 or 15,000 Jews escaped the tragedy of 16 July [1942] it is in large part because of the mobilization of our forces to save them.”
For decades, women have been marginalized in resistance histories; here Mr. Gildea gives them their due and more. He is firmly convinced that without willing girls and women, the various resistances would have been even less effective than they proved to be. He is equally good on the ethnic and class variety of resisters, on the conflicts between the institutional Catholic Church and its priests and nuns, and on regional differences. And grand actions do not get the lion’s share of his attention; he is attentive to actions that caused no material damage but were nonetheless morally effective.
There were multiple “resistances,” Mr. Gildea compellingly argues: “It may be more accurate to talk less about the French Resistance than about resistance in France.” He expands our traditional view of anti-German and anti-Vichy actions to consider the extensive French Empire, and the complicated story of a civil war—there is no other term—between de Gaulle’s nascent “Free French” and the collaborationist Vichy government led by Philippe Pétain. The Maghreb (northern Africa), sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were all theaters of struggle between those who wanted to wait out the Occupation and those who desired urgently to undermine it. One comes away from Mr. Gildea’s history flabbergasted by the multitude of reasons for resisting—patriotic, utopian (the urge to make a better France or Europe), philosophical (concern for social justice), religious, generational (youth challenging their more timid elders)—and by the excuses for not resisting (family duty, fear of losing a job, pacifism, having to continue one’s studies).
American readers might be surprised in reading this book at how the U.S. often plays the role of bugbear. President Roosevelt despised de Gaulle, and his major generals did not trust the leader of the Free French. They believed him to be a Pétain in sheep’s clothing, and they tried mightily to dislodge him several times. They kept the Free French in the dark about D-Day and seriously considered not liberating Paris, de Gaulle’s guiding dream. Also, during the invasion of Normandy, U.S. bombers inadvertently killed thousands of French civilians who had waited patiently for their arrival. Still, most of our GIs were received with flowers and kisses.
Mr. Gildea is meticulous in his analysis of how the French have remembered this fateful half-decade in their history. In the final chapters, he deftly leads us through the minefield of postwar collective memory. Loyalty and distrust continued to inflect the memories of those who had fought the Germans: “Resistance created a fraternity or sorority of heroism and suffering that only those who had experienced it could share. These new relationships, however, were created in dramatic and artificial conditions which often left them troubled and did not always last.” The debris of the Occupation and the resistance against it still spreads itself over the French historical landscape.
Like all such extensive studies, this one has, if not flaws, at least some stylistic infelicities. It bogs down occasionally; there is a maddening plethora of acronyms (as much the subject’s fault as the author’s); and the cast of characters seems unending. It is a history, after all, but Mr. Gildea’s approachable style can be rudely interrupted by lists and repeated descriptions. Yet to quibble should not detract from the book’s forceful purposefulness.
The resistances in France pestered the German army, but German intelligence expertly contained such adversaries up until the last few weeks of the Occupation. The lack of substantive strategic success of the various resistances should not gainsay their tactical skills or their courage. They indeed deserve new attention. Today, as France undergoes a massive influx of refugees and migrants, and most recently a stunning blow to the citizens of its capital, many of the same arguments have risen about what it means to be French, to embrace France’s ideals of liberty, solidarity and equality. Both the left and the right repeatedly make references to World War II and to its human and moral costs. Does France again fear “occupation” by unwelcome “invaders”; or will it stand as a beacon to those who uphold its most revered self-image, that of a nation of individual rights? Mr. Gildea’s “Fighters in the Shadows” robustly illustrates how complicated that choice might be.
