Historical Controversies and Historians

William Lamont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138144910
• eBook ISBN: 9781135361143
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For students new to the subject of history there are many books on the "theory" of writing history but fewer on how history is actually "practised". This work by a team of historians from the University of Sussex fills this gap. The first half of the book examines a number of notable controversies that have been, and still are, the subject of historical debate - for example, race in South Africa, the legacy of the French Resistance, the origins of the Welfare State. These illustrate the issues involved in "doing" history. The second half of the book focuses upon the historians themselves - such as Tawney, Carr, Buckhardt, Weber, Thompson - and demonstrates how the historian puts his/her own spin on historical interpretation. Together the study of controversies and historians shows with clarity the practical issues of historical method. "Historical Controversies and Historians" should be a useful primer for any student embarking on a course in history.

Part One
Historical Controversies

Chapter One

French Resistance: a few home truths

H.R.Kedward

One of the most powerful and emotional visual images of the 1930s was the newsreel footage of Spanish refugees crossing the Pyrenees on foot, in a desperate attempt to escape from the ravages of the Civil War. They were Spanish republicans who had hoped for military aid from republican France, but now, defeated by General Franco’s rebel forces, straggled across the mountains, the men often on crutches, the women in shawls clutching bundles of belongings, and small children in clogs, slipping on the steep paths which were covered in ice and snow. Over the border in France there had been widespread collections of money and clothes, organized by humanitarian groups and the political parties of the Left, and volunteers had been recruited by the Communist Party to fight in the International Brigades, defying the noninterventionist policy of France and Britain. By 1939 it was clear that the Spanish republic had lost, and the distress of the refugees symbolized the collapse of a cause which had fired the political commitment and the poetic imagination of a generation. A year later in France itself, in May 1940, as the tanks of General Guderian broke through the French defences on the Meuse, the French poured on to the roads in a gigantic flood of refugees, fleeing from the advancing German armies of Hitler’s Reich. An estimated six to ten million people took to roads and rail, with horse-drawn carts, bicycles, cars with mattresses on the roof, farm trucks and wheelbarrows, in a flight which mirrored and compounded the military catastrophe. The desperation of the refugees in the Pyrenees was terrifyingly echoed in the plight of those on the roads of northern and central France, from Picardy to the Limousin, from Brittany to the Auvergne.

With younger men mostly mobilized, this civilian exodus during the battle of France was a story of initiative, suffering and despair by women of all ages, older men, and children. The terror of the refugees, attacked by German fighter planes as they tried to get as far into central France as possible, was dramatically re-created after the war in the opening shots of René Clément’s film, Les Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games, 1952), but, at the time, the mass movement of people in the path of the invading Germans was interpreted by certain British and American journalists as cowardice and blind panic. In Britain, Harold Nicolson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information, prefaced an account of the events in France with the words: “In the event of invasion of this island it is the duty of ordinary men and women to stay put and not to block the roads. These extracts from The Road to Bordeaux will give a vivid picture of what happens to a population which disregards these instructions.” The booklet, taken from the eyewitness narrative of the fall of France by Denis Freeman and Douglas Cooper, was called simply Panic.

This was not the way the French experienced it. They saw it not as a “disregard of instructions” but rather as the failure of the government, who left Paris for Bordeaux, and of local authorities who failed to provide a lead in civilian defiance. In Versailles, for example, on 13 June 1940, the town hall was said to have been abandoned, leaving behind a typed notice headed “Evacuation Orders” followed by a single sentence: “La mairie invite tout le monde à fuir” (The municipal authorities call on everyone to take flight). Information was either non-existent or contradictory. For several weeks it was a civilian nightmare. Most remember with relief the broadcast on 17 June by Marshal Pétain, announcing that he had taken over the reins of government and was seeking an end to the conflict. His heart, he said, went out to the refugees on the roads, and he offered himself as a “gift to France” to alleviate the country’s suffering. It was the beginning of a Pétainist cult, which took on religious proportions. In simple words he called on the French to “Go home”. He would look after the affairs of state: the people had only to follow and obey. It was a paternal relationship he offered to France, with himself as wise and benevolent father and the population as his children. His leadership was constituted in a new regime, the Vichy State, and from the start traditional principles of home, family and patriarchal values were pivotal to the politics of Vichy’s “National Revolution”, a programme to settle people back on the land, to introduce a corporatist industrial structure outlawing trade unions, and to mobilize male youths into disciplined work in labour camps. In a climate of scapegoating, uncontested by public opinion, a series of racial decrees and laws dating from as early as July 1940 excluded all Jews, whether foreigners or French, from full citizenship. By 1942 the Vichy police were assisting the German occupiers in the deportation of over 75,000 Jews. Pétain and Laval did nothing to forbid the use of goods trains which transported people like animals, nor did they investigate the increasingly insistent information which came through the Red Cross and other reliable sources that the destination was not “resettlement in the East” but extermination camps.

The racial acts of Vichy are now well known and documented, and any summary of its politics will include that dimension. Its other policies of collaboration with the Germans were either ideologically motivated or acts of expediency, depending on what aspect is under scrutiny, and there is a current tendency among historians to talk of Vichy in the plural, les Vichy, in order to highlight its internal inconsistencies. In the controversy over whether or not Vichy should be called “fascist”, there seems no doubt about the fascism of its Milice, founded in early 1943 as a French version of the Gestapo, while in 1944 three of its ministers, Darnand, Henriot and Déat were squarely in the collaborationist, pro-German camp. Much of Vichy’s ideology, it is often argued, was of a traditional, right-wing, nationalist nature, harking back to a pre-Revolutionary, rural age, with the accent on hierarchy and provincial values, and this competed with the technocratic modernism of some of its ministries. And yet it is this very synthesis of opposites, a familiar characteristic of fascist regimes, which suggests that Vichy, at least in its last two repressive years, was indeed a variant of fascism.

At the Liberation in 1944 Vichy in all its manifestations was swept away and declared illegal and treasonous. There seemed to be no historical or moral doubt that the Resistance, whether symbolized by General de Gaulle, or by the bands of maquis fighters in the woods, had rescued France from the ignominy of collaboration with Nazism into which Pétain, Laval and the Vichy regime had descended.

This bald statement of Vichy failure and resistance success does, however, mask fifty years of contested memory and history which have made the French Resistance into one of the most legendary, disputed and controversial elements in twentieth-century history. Two assertive narratives of resistance dominated in the post-war years, but both saw their hold on history weaken by the mid-1970s. There was a growing disquiet at the national status of the Gaullist version of Resistance, which featured de Gaulle’s BBC “Appel” of 18 June 1940 and his leadership from London and Algiers as the mainspring for resistance within France. De Gaulle’s frequent reference to “La France résistante” as if the whole nation had been involved in resistance activity, could not long survive his own death in 1970, and the powerful documentary film by Marcel Ophuls, Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity, 1971) did much to refocus attention on Vichy and collaboration to the point that it was accepted as self-evident that resistance had never been more than the activity of a small minority. At the same time the Communist Party version, which portrayed the party as the only constant fulcrum of popular resistance, had to face mounting accusations of party inactivity, and even collaboration, before the invasion of Russia in June 1941, and there were escalating doubts about the actual number of party members whom it claimed had been shot in the German repression.

Revision is at the centre of the historical process. The more established the certainties of history, the greater the challenge to find ways of revising and reformulating the questions, approaches and conclusions. The prevalent mode of revisionism is to replace the term “history” with the term “myth”, so that the Gaullist and Communist versions of resistance history become the Gaullist myth and the Communist myth respectively. It is a short distance from here to talking about the whole of French Resistance as a myth, a way of speaking which has carried many historians, journalists and film-makers along with it since the ideological watershed marked by the collapse of the Communist world in 1989. The power and indeed excitement of “myth” lies in its close relationship to opinion, representation and identity. The “myths we live by” denote an accepted form of consciousness about the past and its importance for present identity, but the very label of myth also creates an aura of interrogation and doubt and a hint of deliberate mystification. A myth, however functional to society, is never far removed from the notion of fantasy. For this reason historians need to use the term with care, particularly at a time when a new level of scepticism, with the philosophical status of postmodernism, is calling all meaning and values in history into question. This can be seen as a positive move providing that it opens up debate rather than closing it, but there has been a strong tendency in the 1990s to believe that revisionism in resistance history can only be in one direction: towards more and more doubt about its effectiveness, its size and even its very existence. Resistance as myth shades into resistance as merely image, representation or even fiction.

A review on 14 January 1996 in The Washington Times of a new book by Douglas Porch on The French Secret Services (1995) contained the words: “The section of the book that should excite hot fury in France is Mr Porch’s contention that the fabled French Resistance played only a marginal role in chasing the Germans back to their own borders…Mr Porch does not denigrate the bravery of Resistance fighters, but he establishes a vast gap between legend and reality. He documents…the inability of the Resistance to engender broad popular support”. Other reviews, matched by television debates, were even more triumphant in their confidence that the “myth” or “fable” of the Resistance had finally been exposed, and with it the comfortable view of the past which had buttressed French identity in the post-war world. But, meanwhile, in French, Italian, Greek, Belgian and certain British and American historical circles there has been a palpable rediscovery of resistance to Nazi-occupied Europe. From the late 1980s the previously dominant ways of monopolizing resistance history have been put into a much more pluralist perspective which highlights the range of different resistance groups and individuals and has launched a massive academic analysis of local detail to arrive at a new understanding of the motivations, sociology and culture of resistance.

Not least there has been a return to the dynamics of 1940, and Pétain’s instruction to the people and refugees of France to “Go home”. Metaphorically and literally this created a closed world. Vichy, with its doctrine of family and home, represented a turning inwards, leaving the big issues and decisions to Pétain. By contrast resistance can be seen as a breaking free of domesticity, a bursting out of the closed world, rebelling against the inward-looking, homebased, defensive philosophy of Vichy and the Armistice. If Vichy equalled the home, then resistance equalled the world outside. This formula is compelling, until the equation of Vichy and the home is pushed aside and the historian looks more closely at the connections between home and resistance. A whole dimension of resistance is there to discover, which has been missed because it is so basic and because the original metaphor is heavily gendered. After fifty years the history of resistance within, around, from, and to the home has still to be explored. Hence the title of this chapter: “French Resistance: a few home truths”.

In the twentieth century the most potent symbol of unacceptable authority has been the invasion of the home, the violation of the family, and the brutal crossing of public force into the private sphere. There are the all-seeing television screens in Orwell’s 1984, and the arrest of Joseph K. in his bedroom at the start of Kafka’s The Trial. There is the terrifying painting at the end of the First World War by Max Beckmann, called “The Night” in which a family in their own home are savagely tortured by intruders. The invasion of the home is the modern equivalent of violating the sanctity of the church in the Middle Ages. It is a sign of unlicensed power. Is that what is meant by the connection of the resistance and the home: the arrests and searches to which resisters were constantly exposed, often in the middle of the night? Yes, of course, but it is the most obvious aspect and the one which few people do ignore. Accounts of such incursions by the Gestapo or by the Vichy police are legion. It is important to start at the other end, from the home, from home life and the exigencies of everyday existence under the Occupation.

First of all the curfew, couvre-feu (literally, covering lights). It was imposed in most towns by German ordinance from 10pm or midnight until 6am, but often lengthened for various reasons in specific places to a full ten hours or even twelve. Confined for longer periods in the home, people read more, wrote more letters, and made love more often (the birthrate finally begins to go upwards). People were more conscious of neighbours, of other houses in the neighbourhood or flats on the same staircase, and more reliant on the concierge. Visitors were noticed, and unexpected happenings observed more sharply. This was not, on the face of it, ideal for clandestine purposes, and yet there was also far more noise of home activity, of repairs, hobbies, musicmaking, family quarrels, and listening to the wireless. Typing and duplicating tracts, together with tuning into the BBC or Radio Suisse were covered by the ambient noise, and much preparation of resistance material, including explosives, was done in the home. For example, France Bloch-Sérazin, who was eventually executed for resistance, set up a small laboratory in her tworoom flat in Paris where she made explosives and detonators. Breaking the curfew was not just leaving the house but returning undetected. People discovered, often for the first time, the geography and topography of their home and their neighbourhood, the roofs, the fire-escapes, the back entrances to blocks of flats and the interconnections of ancient town centres. The Croix Rousse in Lyon was a paradigm in its lay-out of houses which connected on different levels through covered passages known as traboules. Many resisters in their oral or written memoirs will point to windows through which they leapt to safety or to passages which swallowed them into the darkness. And the discovery was prolonged into daytime activity, in the endless comings and goings for food and fuel, and the ingenuity of returning home and beating the police controls. It is often said that the only authority that French people resisted was the Ministère de Ravitaillement (Ministry of Provisions), and among some resisters there is a real contempt for the popular obsession with food. But once resisters start talking about the day-to-day mechanisms of revolt, one finds the same dynamic: the ingenuity used in cramming a flat with rabbits in the sideboard, and goats on the balcony, and of working out substitute recipes by using long-neglected ingredients, also went into the production, hiding and disposing of documents, false identity cards, arms and ammunition. Beating the system for food was most people’s first, and often only, brush with illegality. But for many by 1944 it had gone much further.

Petty collisions with authority were frequently a breeding ground for more committed opposition, and there is now a renewed academic interest in forms of food demonstrations and protests, often spontaneous in 1942 and 1943, which took the anger of the home out into the streets. Although the experience of hunger and cold in the towns cannot be seen as an automatic prelude to resistance, it nevertheless played a role in leading many people to challenge the collaboration of Vichy which was seen as providing the German occupiers and French collaborators with the very goods which were denied to the French. Peasant producers in the country-side undoubtedly kept produce away from the public markets in order to sell it at higher prices to individuals and this is normally interpreted as stark self-interest, or, as the urban Vichy prefects called it, “the atavistic egoism of the peasantry”. But for the same reasons as protesters in the towns, peasant villagers and farmers in some specific areas saw their actions as ways of undermining the German occupation and destabilizing Vichy, and in 1943–4 the passive or active support of the peasantry was a vital factor in the history of the maquis units who could not have survived in a hostile environment. It has also to be remembered that many of the maquis bands were themselves composed of young agricultural workers and villagers as well as workers from the towns, and that in many areas of the countryside the local people referred to the maquis as nos gars (our boys). Obsession with food, therefore, was not always a diversion from resistance, but was, in a substantial minority of cases, related to resistance on a sliding scale of illegality and protest.

The experiences of scarcity, crisis and disaster are held to bring people together and to obliterate social divisions, but that is rarely more than a halftruth. Social divisions can also be intensified by the same factors. Increasingly in occupied France those who had enjoyed good food and heating, clothes and comfort-were seen not just in class terms, but as friends of the German authorities and as Vichy supporters. What makes people angry is a necessary question when looking at the origins of resistance, and for many families the anger started in the home, particularly among working people for whom Vichy’s idealized family was nothing more than a sick joke. Some of the most violent newspaper articles produced in the resistance underground press were aimed at exposing the fraudulence of Vichy’s incantation of family virtues, and la fête des mères (mothers’ day) was increasingly ridiculed, particularly in the communist press aimed at women in both the home and the factory.

These initial ways of putting the home back into the history of resistance are not easy: most histories choose to ignore them. In the past ten years certain revisionists have insisted that only organized military actions can be called resistance, so that civil resistance, still less resistance in the home, is not even credited. The ones to suffer most from this military definition are predictably women. Putting their resistance actions into social and historical perspective involves an evaluation of their role in the home, which can easily be interpreted as a regressive form of analysis. But the light that this sheds on the realities of the time is crucial. In my own case it was the process of interviewing ex-maquisards in rural France during the 1970s which underlined the gender conventions and finally disclosed new research possibilities. I would arrive in the resister’s home for the interview and a table would have been prepared with chairs, one clearly intended for the maquisard and another for myself, with the tape-recorder on the table. During the interview, the wife or sister, who had frequently been fully committed to resistance, would stay at the doorway, nudging the man’s version of events along with corrections of detail or forgotten names and dates, but only rarely agreeing to sit at the table. The “woman in the doorway”, I realised, was clearly a fixed social and cultural role, as indeed it appears in Le Chagrin et la pitié in the filmed interviews with the peasant brothers, Alexis and Louis Grave, when the wife of Alexis Grave made all her contributions from her vantage point at the door. If the doorway was a site of women’s action and possibly power which people took for granted, it would certainly have been significant under the Occupation, and I began, therefore, to look for “the woman at the doorway” and the exercise of that power in the police reports of the time, which had only recently been made available in the archives. The abundance of cases that I found was overwhelming, from well-known resistance names to anonymous villagers. Two examples can stand for them all:

In November 1941 the French police and Gestapo knocked at the door of a flat in Paris in which arms, documents and plans were hidden. De Gaulle’s niece, Geneviève de Gaulle, was living there with another of her uncles Pierre de Gaulle. Geneviève went to the door and held up the police for several minutes by what she called social chatter, the sort of talk expected by men from a woman at the door. Meanwhile one relative inside hid or destroyed material and another escaped from a back window to alert Geneviève’s mother who was due home with a bag of documents. The search revealed nothing.

Madame le B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Historical Controversies
• Part Two Historians