French Resistances and the Shadow of the Great War

Abstract

This chapter analyses the role played by World War I in French Resistances fighters’ mental landscape during the annees noires—that is, the German occupation of France during World War II. It will consider both the interior Resistance, which fought on metropolitan soil, and Free France, which comprised about 70 000 French women and French men who, from June 1940 to 31 July 1943, assembled around General de Gaulle or were injured or even killed trying to join him. Examining the complex relationships between the French Resistances and the shadow of World War I is a difficult task for at least five reasons. First, the Great War was not the only conflict that could be considered to form part of the mental representations of the Free French and of the interior Resistance fighters: the war in Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and the Franco-French fractures of the 1930s also played their role. Second, the annees noires were a particularly complicated context that favoured ‘ambivalent and apparently contradictory behaviours’ related to what Laborie called the ‘double way of thinking’. Third, the phenomenon of resistance itself is essentially an intricate subject as evidenced by the great number of studies devoted to it.5 Fourth, it is very difficult to probe the hearts and minds of its combatants as they have not left many traces of the personal thoughts they nurtured between 1940 and 1945. Fifth, the reference to the Great War was not the sole prerogative of the Resistance: the supporters of Marshal Petain and of the Vichy regime also made good use of it. [First paragraph]