“If you haven’t been through the horrors of an occupation by a foreign power, you have no right to pronounce upon what a country does which has been through all that,” Sir Anthony Eden, The Sorrow and the Pity/Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969).

“To be in the Resistance, you had to be maladjusted,” Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigiere, Resistance leader, The Sorrow and the Pity.

It has been estimated that approximately two per cent of the adult French population, some 400,000 people, were actively involved in the French Resistance during World War 2, when France was occupied by Nazi Germany for over four years. [1] (The country was divided into two zones by the Germans: the north and the western coast came under direct German occupation, the south was declared a so-called ‘free zone’, which was governed by the puppet Vichy regime, led by Marshal Pétain.) The Resistance itself wasn’t one unified body, but rather a series of clandestine regional groups, movements and organisations, which carried out a range of activities, including the sabotage of the railway network, the assassinations of German soldiers and collaborationists, assisting Allied pilots who had been shot down over France, the reconnaissance of enemy troop movements and deployments, and the publication of underground newspapers.

The resistants themselves came from diverse backgrounds. Amongst their ranks were Communists and Catholic royalists, urban intellectuals and rural peasants (the latter forming the Maquis). The virulently anti-Semitic laws passed by the Vichy government ensured that many Jewish citizens joined the underground struggle. The numbers in the Resistance swelled after 1943, partly because the Germans introduced a compulsory work order, the STO (service du travail obligatoire), which requested that young adult French males perform two years of compulsory labour service in Germany, and partly because the tide of the war was turning in favour of the Allies. Yet as historian Richard Vinen argues, it would be a mistake to view the ‘resistants of the eleventh hour’ as people taking the easy option, for the most bitter fighting in France and some of the most appalling massacres perpetrated by the German forces (for example at Orador-sur-Glane) took place in the last year of the war. [2]

When France was liberated in the summer of 1944, following the Normandy landings, it was politically imperative that the leader of the Free French forces, General Charles de Gaulle, who had spent the war exiled in London, establish the ‘Gaullist resistancialist myth’ [3]: namely that France, with the exception of the Vichy regime, had universally resisted the enemy. (There were justifiable fears that civil war might break out in the country amongst the various factions jostling for power at this time.) According to the film critic André Bazin, it was in this immediate post-Liberation period that ‘in France the Resistance immediately entered the realm of legend’. [4] Such myth-making however had to ignore some unpalatable truths: that 75,000 French Jews, for example, had been deported to the death camps with the active collusion of the French authorities, and that there had been venomous conflicts within French society between the dark years of 1940 and 1944, which had constituted what the historian Henri Rousso calls a ‘Franco-French war.’ [5] In terms of French films a post-war Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema was established in order to vet home-grown films and thus help create a sense of national unity. One famous filmmaker to fall foul of this body was Henri-Georges Clouzot, who would later make The Wages of Fear/Le Salaire de la peur (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955). His Le Corbeau (1943) though, a caustic thriller made during the occupation about a provincial town falling prey to a poison-pen letter campaign, was deemed to be an anti-French work of collaboration, and the director was banned from making films for four years.

Unsurprisingly the films that did emerge in this era tended to paint the Resistance in a flattering light. Susan Hayward [6] estimates that between 1944 and 1947 some 15 French films were made relating to the Resistance. These included Jericho (1946), where an RAF bombing raid allows prisoners in Amiens, amongst them resistants, to escape from jail. There was also Le Père Tranquille (1946), where the gentle insurance agent father turns out to be head of a local Resistance network planning to bomb a factory, his son joins the Maquis, and his daughter falls in love with an underground fighter. Above all there was La Bataille du Rail (1946), which did the most cinematically to establish the myth of French resistance. Directed by René Clément, this neo-realist drama pays tribute to the role of railway workers in disrupting German supply lines. Using authentic locations, non-professional actors and newsreel footage, it was made in co-operation ‘with the military commission of the Resistance National Council.’ [7] What’s notable about the film, like Rossellini’s contemporaneous Rome, Open City/Roma, città aperta (1945), is that it doesn’t concentrate on a single hero: instead it’s a work that commemorates the collective efforts of a number of men, suggesting that ‘change can be achieved through united group action’. [8] Thus when workers are executed by German soldiers in retaliation for the derailment of an armament train, train whistles are blown in solidarity.

This chapter aims to trace how depictions of the Resistance have so markedly changed in French cinema in the sixty years since La Bataille du Rail, reflecting the shifts in historical interpretations of life in France during World War 2. Four landmark films will be analysed – Melville’s Army in the Shadows/L’Armée des ombres (1969), Ophüls’ documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974), and Audiard’s A Self Made Hero/Un héros très discret (1996) all of which were released after the 1968 uprisings and the retirement from office of General de Gaulle. And a number of other films will also be considered, with sections on women in the Resistance (Lucie Aubrac (1997), Female Agents/Les Femmes de l’ombre (2008)), representations of cinema and theatre personnel during the occupation (Laissez-Passer (2002) and The Last Metro/Le Dernier metro (1980)), and firstly a trio of films, made between 1949 and 1961 (The Silence of the Sea/La Silence de la Mer, A Man Escaped/Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut and Léon Morin, Priest/Léon Morin, prêtre), where Resistance is approached from a more oblique perspective.

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