thinking about (French) resistance

The year or so that I spent living in France (alongside another year or so in French-speaking Switzerland) was under very particular circumstances—working with a group of mostly Americans doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based church—that led to some idiosyncratic experiences in the country. Perhaps one of the oddest was a small, shared, and superficial obsession with Marshal Ferdinand Foch of World War I fame. This grew out of the fact that the church we were working with rented an apartment on the boulevard Maréchal Foch in Grenoble; those of us who had been assigned to work in that area and live in that apartment had really fallen in love with Grenoble, which translated into constantly talking about Foch (the street) as a superior place to live. We didn’t know much about Foch (the person), but we knew he must have been pretty cool to have a street named after him, and we knew—with all the confidence of Iraq War-era Americans—that he must be better than Marshal Pétain, since Pétain had been a coward who surrendered to the Germans. (That Foch had been dead for nearly two decades at this point wasn’t really on our minds).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly making my way through Julian Jackson’s France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain, which has in no way turned me into a Pétainist—but has challenged the naïve views that I held while living on bd Maréchal Foch. For one, it’s repeatedly mentioned Foch’s post-war reactionary politics, which I’d like to learn more about (but that I suspect wouldn’t do anything to dent his reputation among some of those I knew who were most Foch-obsessed). The book hasn’t been as gripping as I hoped when I started it, but it did inspire me to finally get around to watching Un village français, a 2009-2017 TV series about a fictional French village under German occupation but very close to the line separating the occupied zone from Pétain’s Vichy France.

The show is further reinforcing an idea that further began in my head while listening to the book on Pétain: If I had lived in occupied France, it’s hard to say whether I would have been fully engaged in resistance, if I would have consented to collaboration, or if I would have tried to find an uneasy balance between the two. I think I could have done better than Pétain did, but as I watch the fictional characters of the TV show decide whether to take German contracts at their sawmill, how to respond to German demands as mayor of the town, and otherwise wrestle with trying to make a life under German occupation, I honestly don’t know what lines I would draw and where I would be willing to compromise. Of course, this is more than just a hypothetical exercise—there’s lots happening in this country right now that I don’t approve of, and I know I’m unlikely to totally avoid total “collaboration” with the powers that be.

I’m reminded of when I first read the late John Lewis’s March trilogy of graphic novels recounting his experiences during the Civil Rights movement. It occurred to me while reading them that in hindsight, it was very easy for me to be on the side of the protestors—but that if I had been living at that time, there was a strong chance that I would have been the kind of white moderate that Martin Luther King excoriated in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Now, as I watch the characters of Un village français make choices that I feel uneasy about, I wonder how I am, too, conceding to the powers that be for pragmatic reasons instead of being the kind of pure, resistant hero that seems the most in the right. Of course, watching the show also makes me more sympathetic to those who made those choices, so I don’t think it’s helpful to berate myself for every small concession. I just hope that when things become really important, I have the courage to make the right choice.

• Philippe Pétain
• Ferdinand Foch
• France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain
• France
• World War II
• French Resistance
• Julian Jackson
• John Lewis
• March
• Letter from Birmingham Jail
• Martin Luther King Jr.