IV.5. WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID

4.5. MENU: What happened? The war did

THE RIGHT WOULD NEVER HAVE ACCEPTED THE CHANGES THAT EXPLAIN EUROPE'S POSTWAR STABILITY — AND THE 13TH'S MUTATION AND FRENCH LEFT-WING HISTORIOGRAPHY— 

WITHOUT ITS WORLD WAR II DEFEAT 

Its collaborationist leaders could not oppose them, because they were in prison, in hiding or shot.

 

Plaque next to railroad tracks in working-class Ménilmontant

Such memorials to patriots who died during the Liberation dot the city, except in the conservative west. 

They also evoke the immense prestige of the Resistance after the war, which was largely Communist ("the party of the 100,000 shot"), which is the other reason for the transformation.

In brief

• Left and right in wartime France 

• Conservatives who join the Resistance

*     *     *

Next,

Left and right in wartime France

LEFT AND RIGHT IN WARTIME FRANCE

 

FRANCE WAS THE ONLY STATE TO LEGALLY ELECT A PUPPET REGIME, WHICH MANY CONSERVATIVES BACKED EVEN AS GERMAN DEFEAT LOOMED

Context:

• Fury at the victory of the Popular Front, which brought the 40-hour week, collective bargaining, two-weeks paid vacation... (in 1936-38)

    

Songs of struggle and hope (in French)

 Herodotus

• ...led to the slogan,"Better Hitler than Blum,"*  and to the collaborationist regime. It protected France from Hitler's most extreme demands, which freed the Nazis to dominate most of Europe.

*Léon Blum, the Socialist Prime Minister

As well, local police were far more effective in deporting Jews and in suppressing the Resistance than outsiders would have been.

• Anti-left posters

"The Soviets pull the strings of the POPULAR FRONT"

Newspaper excerpts from the Pas-de-Calais region in Normandy

For an enlarged picture and 10 other posters of the time, please click

"The Popular Front, Bolshevism's henchman? Beware of Communist hypocrisy, Vote France;The real peril; How Communists are preparing the revolution in France; For or against the Popular Front"  

Vichy's "National Revolution" compares a corrupt, internationalist Left with an upstanding, family-oriented, nationalist Right.

# # #

So the Resistance came mainly from the left and after Germany invaded the USSR (in June 1941), particularly from Communists. 

 

Publication unknown (photo from loose magazine pages found at a flea market)

Communists leave prison to be shot (in 1943).

"The party of the 75,000 shot," they called themselves.

An exaggeration, said de Gaulle,

but true enough to make Communists'

coming to power in Western Europe likely:

That is the rarely stated reason

for the Marshall Plan.

*    *    *
Next,
Conservatives who join the Resistance

CONSERVATIVES WHO JOINED THE RESISTANCE

SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND JEAN MOULIN, DID FIGHT THE OCCUPIERS

As well, in the cemetery reserved to families of noble victims of the guillotine, plaques honor Resistance members who died in concentration camps...

The Picpus cemetery: please click and scroll down. 

...and others left memories alone.

To be sure, the left-right alliance was ambiguous

De Gaulle is accused of betraying Communist fighters at the end of the war.* Conservative fighters had nothing to do with that drama, but they shared the Left's patriotism, not its vision of social justice. 

* Wikipedia, which follows the mainstream, says he only abandoned them. 

Fighting alongside people whose ideals were entirely different

must have made it still harder.

By wrenching themselves away from the prejudices and interests 

of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect for walking the extra mile.

Plaque at the Picpus cemetery

Remember before God

Jean Marie Philibert Victurnien

Marquis de Laguiche

Croix de Guerre 14-18

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

Born July 9 1889

Deported to Buchenwald and Neu-Strasstrier *

Killed by the SS at Shildau on April 17 1945

and his son

Claude Pascal Marie de la Guiche

Knight of the Legion of Honneur

S/L de la 1er R.M.S.M. de la Div. Leclerc * *

Fallen in Haute-Sarthe * * *

on August 11 1944 at age 22

*Salt mines: "...we left Buchenwald for a destination unknown to us, which turned out to be the salt mines of Neu-Strassfurt." Most of the 459 French prisoners who were sent there died.

-- Text found thanks to information provided by Michael Zwerger, German manager

** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, including Alamein in 1943, landed in Normandy with the Leclerc Division in June '44 and fought on until the end of the war. 

-- Marc Ambrose-Rendu, military historian, personal communication

*** Haute-Sarthe: the Loire Valley

# # #

After the war,
certain survivors from both sides

became well-known politicians.

They might meet for dinner 

in the private salon of a restaurant

known for its discretion.

Sure not to appear together in the next day's press,  
they would recall the time 
when they were brothers in arms. 

-- Told me by the late gastronomical critic Henri Viard

So ends Part IV.

It has shown the importance

of France's 19th-century insurrections

which the Resistance continued

and whose traces remain.

*     *     *

Part V, next and last,  
When observation and the usual story clash