Clichés of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar French Film

Abstract

Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar French Film Marc Siegel The final scene of Claude Autant-Lara's 1947 film, Le diable au corps, takes place at Marthe's funeral. As the pallbearers carry her coffin down bells the church steps, they hear the bells, raise their heads, and smile. ring out peace, the Armistice, thus the The end of World War I. But is for Frangois, Marthe's lover, rejoicing. who hovers in the background, the funeral not a day for Go hang your flags! he shouts as he retreats into the darkness is of the church. His personal grief, however, joy. In the no match for the pallbearers' light foreground of the image, they continue walking into the of the country's future?), while Fran9ois, with in the of day (the brightness his memo- shadows behind them. commemorative events, Marthe's funeral and Armistice Day, this overdetermined image can serve as a starting point for a consideration of the complex relationship between history and memory in postwar French film. After World War II, French society was divided by internal conflicts stemming from competing opin- ries of Marthe, remains its With juxtaposition of two different orders of ions about the war, the Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance. to According Henry Rousso, the bitter experiences under the Nazi Occupation and the Vichy Regime resuscitated a history of ideological differences among the French people dating as far back as the Revolution. Of these various guerrels]franco-frangaise[sJ the Occupation has remained the most di- visive, as a result largely, though not exclusively, of the significance of the notes, civil wars home-grown Vichy regime. As Rousso the hardest to deal with afterward, for in a foreign have always been war the enemy goes home when hostilities end in a civil war the 'enemy' remains (8). itself insufficient De Gaulle's triumphant return to France in 1944 was in cause for the the unification of the country after such a hostile civil war. Whence emer- gence and importance of what Rousso calls the Gaullist a unifying vision for the country with the resistancialist myth, unavowed objective [of present- ing] an interpretation of the past in light of the urgent needs of the present This myth served in part to subsume the bitter personal differences, the French beneath the among image of an eternal France united is in resis- tance to external enemies. Made soon writers Jean after De Gaulle's return, Le diable au corps is an adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's 1923 novel by the prolific tradition of quality screen- Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The novel a remembrance of the