France views the Resistance with fresh eyes

Kyt · Feb 20, 2008

France views the Resistance with fresh eyes - Telegraph

France is undergoing a major shift in the perception of the country's wartime collaboration with the Nazis, marked by a new television film focusing on the unsung heroes of the Resistance.

Historians say that after a period of overblown pride in wartime resistance, the French had swung in recent decades to a national sense of guilt over the country's submission to its German occupiers.

The docu-drama, La Résistance, shown on French television, focuses on little known, often small-scale acts of resistance during four years of Nazi occupation.

Pierre Laborie, a historian, said the film clarified the fact that "an enormous number of people refused to give in (to collaborating)".

Mr Laborie, who wrote France under Vichy and the Occupation, said it would help fight against the prevailing view of a "cowardly and limp" France. That view was "a cliché that I hear all the time, and very rooted in the thirty-something generation".

"Even when the Germans were flying from victory to victory, the very great majority (of French) did not consent to the politics of collaboration," he told Le Parisien.

The first part of the film focuses primarily on lesser known examples of revolt, such as a 16-year-old jailed for cutting telephone wires, a child sticking his tongue out at a German seconds before being executed or miners risking death by going on strike.

The second episode concentrates on those who hid Jews or chose not to denounce their neighbours.

French resistance groups fought the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, from July 1940 to August 1944.

Most historians until now have put the number of those involved at a few hundred thousand.

But Mark Pottier, a historian at the Caen war memorial, said official figures about the Resistance did not give the full picture.

"Today it's no longer black and white. Certainly there were collaborators, but many Resistance members in everyday life fought back often with small gestures," he said.

"It's easy to cast the first stone, but everyone should ask himself what would I have done or been capable of doing?"

The film, directed by Christophe Nick, was released amid a row sparked by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he wanted all 10-year-old schoolchildren to "adopt" one of the 11,000 Jewish children from France killed in the Holocaust and learn all about them.

"We must tell a child the truth," he said last week. "It is ignorance that prompts the repetition of abominable situations, not knowledge. Make our children into children with open eyes."

However, many psychologists, teachers and parents were outraged, saying that 10-year-olds did not have the emotional maturity to cope.

Serge Klarsfeld, a Nazi hunter who has done more than anyone to identify and honour deported French Jews, cautiously welcomed the plan, but Simone Veil, a former health minister and herself an Auschwitz survivor, described it as "blood-chilling".

Faced with such criticism, Xavier Darcos, the education minister, sought to defuse the row yesterday by suggesting that it could be adapted to honouring one child per class.
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Kitty · Feb 20, 2008

wish I could watch this series, sound svery good.

As to the 'adopt a victim' idea for 10 year olds - no. They are too young to understand the horrors yet. Maybe when they are 12.

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