VIII.9. WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID

8.9. MENU: WHAT HAPPENED? THE WAR DID 

AFTER THE WAR THE RIGHT COULD NO LONGER OPPOSE REFORMS: EVEN EVERYDAY PEOPLE HID, WERE IMPRISONED OR SHOT  

Then the left, which included many who had fought with the Resistance, put through the social laws that help French people still. 

Plaque next to railroad tracks in working-class Ménilmontant

Such memorials to fighters killed during the Liberation dot the city, except in the conservative west. 

In brief 

• "Better Hitler than Blum" (the Socialist leader of the 1930's)

• Conservatives who joined the Resistance

*    *    *

Next,

"Better Hitler than Blum" 

"BETTER HITLER THAN BLUM" (the Socialist leader of the 1930's)...

 

WAS THE SLOGAN OF THE RIGHT AFTER THE POPULAR FRONT, AN ALLIANCE OF THE LEFT, CAME TO POWER

(IN 1936)

  

Zoom

Photomontage with Socialist leader Leon Blum and Communist leader Maurice Thorez, 1936

It brought the 40-hour week, collective bargaining, two weeks of paid vacation...

                                                                                                                                 Zoom

Songs of Struggle and Hope

      Herodotus

...lasting gratitude...

Zoom

The Front Populaire métro station in Aubervilliers, a working-class suburb of Paris

...and fury. 

Simone de Beauvoir* describes the ambiance two months before the left's seismic victory:

*The writer and philosopher who described a café during the Occupation.

"The 'patriots' had wanted to give the funerals of Bainville [a royalist historian and journalist] the glow of national mourning. On coming back from the ceremony on the boulevard Saint-Germain they passed the car that was taking Léon Blum to the Chamber; they stopped it, molested the occupants, seriously wounding Blum before the police intervened. There were arrests; Maurras [leader of a far-right movement], who had written violent articles against Blum, was pursued for provoking murder and condemned to several months in  prison. The Popular Front organized a massive demonstration against Blum's aggressors [...]. Meetings, demonstrations [from the left] confirmed the imminence of victory... ."

-- The Prime of Life, 1960, 271-272 (my trans.)

# # #

Self-interest and racism motivated innumerable European collaborators, but France was the only occupied country to legally elect a puppet government.*

*Memories of the19th-century insurrections, especially La Commune, explain that difference.  

The messaging of the Vichy regime:

 

     "It's the Soviets who 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"  

The puppet government's "National Revolution" compares a corrupt, internationalist left with an upstanding, family-oriented, patriotic right.

# # #

Collaboration protected France from the most extreme German demands, but... 

• Freed Nazi forces to dominate most of the rest of Europe.

• Facilitated deporting Jews and members of the Resistance.  

# # #

The Resistance came mainly from the left and after the invasion of the USSR (in June 1941), was largely Communist: They called themselves"the party of the 75,000 shot."  

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

Communists leave prison for execution (in 1943).

An exaggeration, said de Gaulle,

but true enough to make Communists'

coming to power in Western Europe likely:

That is the reason for the Marshall Plan.

*    *    *
Next,
Conservatives who joined the Resistance

CONSERVATIVES WHO JOINED THE RESISTANCE

SOME, LIKE DE GAULLE AND UNIFIER OF THE MOUVEMENT JEAN MOULIN, ARE FAMOUS

Others rest in the cemetery reserved to descendants of nobles who were guillotined during the Revolution, with plaques that honor them:

The Picpus cemetery: please click and scroll down. 

But most are recalled by 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 (Wikipedia, which follows the mainstream, says he only abandoned them). Conservative fighters had nothing to do with that drama, but they shared the Left's patriotism, not its vision of social justice. 

...and fighting alongside people with contrary values must have made the choice still harder.

By wrenching themselves away from the prejudices and interests 

of their class, those descendants of the Versaillais deserve particular respect.

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.

-- Thanks to Michael Zwerger for this information

** R.M.S.M.: Régiment de Marche de Spahis Marocains ("Marching Regiment of the Moroccan Spahis"). It fought in Lebanon in 1941, in Tunisia, at El-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 (please click and scroll down).

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

*    *    *

Next and last,

IX.

"THE FUTURE SPRINGS UP FROM BEHIND"

IX. "THE FUTURE SPRINGS UP FROM BEHIND"

 

THE VIOLENT, TRAGIC AND FINALLY SUCCESSFUL STRUGGLES OF THE PAST ARE THE REASON FOR THE INFINITELY HAPPIER CITY NOW

"We've forgotten 1848, but we still hear the Commune's scream," a professor said in the 1960's. Militants of the Popular Front and members of the French Resistance looked back to it. 

 "The future is not what is in front of us, 

but springs up from behind." 

-- Rahel Levin

Heroines and songs of La Commune, under street art in the 13th.

Almost, but not quite,

the end of Blook I.

*     *     *

IX.x 

Epilogues