Everybody Was in the French Resistance … Now!: American Representations of the French Resistance

Abstract

An examination of American representations of the Resistance since World War II in American press and film reveals that they have evolved according to French−American relations and American attitudes towards France and the French people. Admired during the war for forms of civilian resistance absent in recent American history, resisters re-emerged for American New Left readers of existentialism as models of engagement. However, in the ensuing conservative, gallophobic period in the United States, the French Resistance lost this iconic status and is treated ironically or rendered absent.

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“…This characterization is reminiscent of the narrative propagated by Charles de Gaulle and his "Free French" movement, which upheld that "the French [people], defeated but defiant after 1940, were virtually all sympathetic to, if not indeed active participants in, the Resistance" (Mitchell, 2010, p. 12). These interpretations also became a part of the American public discourse through, for example, wartime Hollywood films made by French filmmaker Jean Renoir, official visits by Charles de Gaulle to New York in 1944/1945 meant to win over the U.S. leadership for the cause of the "Free French", and the postwar translation of novels about the French resistance written by Joseph Kessel and others (Reid, 2012). However, this characterization has been actively refuted since the 1970s by historians such as Paxton (1972), who has described how the wartime French Vichy leadership and a broader French conservative movement was often actively willing to collaborate with the Nazi occupier.…”