Table Of ContentRemembering the Occupation
in French Film
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Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture
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Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe
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“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture
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Remembering the Occupation
in French Film
National Identityin Postwar Europe
Leah D. Hewitt
REMEMBERINGTHEOCCUPATIONINFRENCHFILM
Copyright © Leah D. Hewitt, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60130-7
A portion of Chapter 4 of the present work appeared in a different version in the following:
Hewitt, Leah D. “From War Films to Films on War: Gendered Scenarios of National
Identity, The Case of The Last Metro,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature26, no.1
(Winter 2002): 74–85.
Part of Chapter 6 appeared in a different version as “Identity Wars in ‘L’Affaire (Lucie)
Aubrac’: History, Fiction, Film,” Contemporary French Civilization, 22:2 (Summer/Fall
1999), 264–84.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner what-
soever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in crit-
ical articles or reviews.
First published in 2008 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan
division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan© is a regis-
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registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37070-2 ISBN 978-0-230-61210-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230612105
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hewitt, Leah Dianne.
Remembering the occupation in French film: national identity in postwar Europe / by
Leah D. Hewitt.
p. cm. — (Studies in European culture and history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. World War, 1939-1945—Motion pictures and the war. 2. France—In motion pic-
tures. 3. Motion pictures—France—History. 4. National characteristics, French. 5.
France—History—German occupation, 1940-1945. I. Title.
D743.23.H48 2008
791.43’658—dc22 2007027284
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: February 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1 Film as Memory: A Battleground for Shaping Identity 1
2 Transitions Before the “Sorrow”: Criticism and Myth 35
in the Late 1950s and Early 1960s
3 Identity Politics in Films of the 1970s 65
4 Occupational Performances in Truffaut’s 101
The Last Metro
5 Ambiguous National Icons in Chabrol’s 125
Story of Women
6 Love Stories, Real/Cinematic Heroines, the 155
Postmoderns: The 1980s and Beyond
7 In Lieu of a Conclusion 191
Notes 197
Bibliography 231
Index 243
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project, originally titled “Marianne at the Movies,” has taken a
long time to come to fruition, and there have been many people
along the way who have helped me with their encouragement and
support. I am glad to have this opportunity to thank colleagues,
friends, and family.
I have been fortunate to have departmental colleagues at Amherst
College who have provided me with invaluable feedback and biblio-
graphical sources, as well as their friendship. I offer my warmest
thanks to Paul Rockwell, Jay Caplan, Rosalina de la Carrera, Laure
Katsaros, and Ron Rosbottom. Each in his or her way made my writ-
ing more pleasurable. I wish to thank my students at Amherst
College who, through their insistent questioning, have helped me
formulate my ideas about French identity in postwar film. I am
grateful to Margaret Groesbeck for helping me locate needed
sources and to Bridget Dahill and Nicholas Dahlman for preparing
film photographs. I would also like to acknowledge the Faculty
Seminar at Amherst College that allowed me to share my project
with colleagues. I cannot thank enough the Amherst College French
Department’s administrative assistants, Bobbie Helinski and Liz
Eddy, for their tireless dedication, generosity, even-tempered dispo-
sition, and superb efficiency. I am also indebted to Amherst College
for the financial support, fellowships, and sabbatical leaves I have
been generously awarded for my research over the last several years.
There are many colleagues and friends outside Amherst who have
been instrumental to the realization of this project. Special thanks
go to Joe Golsan, Lynn Higgins, and Panivong Norindr for their
warm encouragement, invaluable suggestions, and friendship. I am
grateful to my friend Martine Guyot-Bender at Hamilton College,
and the graduate students in French at Princeton University for
inviting me to lecture on my topic and for sharing their ideas with
me. I continue to be grateful to Marie-Hélène Huet for her gentle,
viii Acknowledgments
yet probing questions about my work. I express my appreciation to
Alan Williams, who included me many years ago in a conference on
films dealing with World War II; this was perhaps the spark that got
my whole project started. To Keith Reader, I owe my gratitude for
reading and commenting in depth on an early version of my chapter
treating Lacombe Lucien. I thank Geneviève Sellier for having sug-
gested that I look at téléfilms on the Occupation.
I wish to thank my parents for their constant support. Thanks to
Pickle and Tica for challenging my focus. Finally, without the daily
emotional backing of Kevin Clark, this project would never have
gone anywhere. To him, I offer my love and gratitude.
4
C H A P T E R 1
FILM AS MEMORY: A BATTLEGROUND
FOR SHAPING IDENTITY
The function of cinema, even above its artistic function, is to
satisfy the immutable collective psychic needs that have been
repressed.
—André Bazin (October 1943)
F
rance’s ongoing efforts at self-definition at the end of the twenti-
eth century and into the twenty-first have involved new conceptions
of citizenship and nationality, as well as what it means to be French,
culturally and internationally. But the struggle to set national param-
eters has also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in
which France could recognize itself. In a 2002 essay entitled “What
is a European,” A. S. Byatt noted that, in Europe, “a lot of 50- and
60-year-olds seem to become spontaneously obsessed with geneal-
ogy and memoirs.”1 Belgian born filmmaker Chantal Akerman has
said that the “only thing countries in Europe have in common is
their collective guilt in allowing the Nazis to slaughter Europe’s Jew-
ish population during the Second World War.”2The fixation on the
war’s moral dimensions has no doubt besieged all of postwar
Europe. It has been particularly acute in France, as the French have
persistently and agonizingly reconsidered the war’s effects on their
“collective memory.”3
To be sure, France’s ethical dilemmas in evaluating its participa-
tion in the war are not without similarity to those of other Western
European countries. As Tony Judt has pointed out, “for most Euro-
peans World War II was experienced not as war of movement and
2 REMEMBERING THE OCCUPATION IN FRENCH FILM
battle but as a daily degradation, in the course of which men and
women were betrayed and humiliated, forced into daily acts of petty
crime and self-abasement, in which everyone lost something and
many lost everything.”4 Like Belgium and Norway, France had had
a government in exile that meted out punishment and praise upon its
return in the early postwar years. Akin to previously occupied coun-
tries such as Belgium, Holland, the Netherlands, and Norway, or to
the losers of the war (Germany and Italy), postwar France had to
contend with muddled definitions of resistance and collaboration in
its postwar purges of officials and companies who had had business
(willingly or unwillingly) with the Nazis, or who had carried out
their orders. Just as in France, local administrations in Norway, Bel-
gium, and Holland had readily helped manage German rule.5 Den-
mark was the exception, with few groups willing to collaborate with
the German authorities (and with fewer Jews deported as a conse-
quence).6On the whole, collaboration with the Nazis had been less
widespread in Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway than in
France. Paradoxically, in the former, the number of individuals sent
to prison for collaboration was comparatively high, as public rage
fueled judicial proceedings. In France, on the other hand, where col-
laboration had been more extensive, the process was incomplete, as
relatively few went to jail or were executed.7Despite these very real
differences, the unfinished accounting of wartime actions plagued
nearly all European countries, east or west, with the majority having
reopened the issues between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, as
new generations of citizens looked at their elders’ past.
France’s unique status as a resisting and collaborating nation in
an official capacity, at war with itself in the guise of Free France (de
Gaulle’s government in London) and Vichy (Pétain’s government in
Vichy), made its situation, if not entirely distinct, at least an extreme
version of what others went through in terms of internal battles. In
some ways, France’s attempts at postwar reckoning are closer to
those of Italy, which switched from the Axis to the Allies in 1943. In
both cases, “after decades of resistance-dominated memory, a
process of demystification-desecration of antifascist mythology
began... and continues today.”8Tony Judt has generalized France’s
memory crisis in claiming that “every occupied country in Europe
developed its own ‘Vichy syndrome,’”9 that is to say, like France,
they all repressed their complicity with the Nazi occupation, a mem-
ory that resurfaced years later.
