Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France

Collaboration and Resistance in Occupied France

Louis Malle: Lacombe Lucien (1974)

Introduction

Most European national cinemas are marked by their diversity and it is meaningless to talk of a typical European film as all have very different concerns and formal characteristics. Just as their are many conflicting European identities, so there are many different European national cinemas. This said however, there emerged in a number of European national cinemas from the early 1970s onwards, a common preoccupation with revisiting the war years - that quintessential European event - and coming to terms with Europe's fascist past.

Films like Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Strategem (1970) and The Conformist (1970); Liliane Cavanni's The Night Porter (1974); Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974); Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977); István Szabó's Mephisto (1981); and Ricardo Franco's Pascal Duarte (1975) all bear witness to an ongoing struggle to make sense of Europe's immediate history.

In part, these films emerge from a changed cultural climate in which political filmmaking had become more common. This is a common feature of all European cinemas, and particularly in France after the events of May 1968. Moreover, most of these films were made by a younger generation of filmmakers who were children during the war years and who were anxious to gain a better understanding of the period which was still covered in darkness. However, these films also emerged from the specific social and political contexts of their respective countries of origin. This lecture will look at the cinematic representation of the war years in France and will take as its case study Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974).

Louis Malle: Lacombe Lucien (1974)

Louis Malle was born in 1925 in Thumières in northern France of a traditional catholic background. He is one of France's more sucessful and best known film directors and has worked in both France as well as the USA. His earliest films were made in the late 1950s and early 1960s and were immediately associated with the so-called nouvelle vague of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

Malle made two films set during the Occupation: Lacombe Lucien in 1974 and Au Revoir les enfants in 1987. It is, however, the first film about occupied France, Lacombe Lucien that caused the greatest stir in France. Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974) is the story of a young peasant from south-western France. The film is set in the early summer of 1944, a time in which Vichy had become overtly fascist and its conservaves had abandonned it to the extremists. Rejected by the Resistance, who he initially approaches, he finds himself involved with the local Gestapo and their French collaborators. It is whilst working with the Gestapo, that Lucien finds himself, with the same lack of intent and reflection that led him to join the fascist militia, fall in love with and begin a sexual relationship with a young Jewish woman called France.

The Gaullist Myth

During the Gaullist era about 60 films were made set in the period of the Occupation. The peak years were between 1958 and 1962 when 30 films were made, half of which were substantially about the resistance.

About consolidating the power of De Gaulle who had become president of he Fifth Repblic in 1958 and who radically increased the powers of the presidency at the expense of parliament. Charles, André, Joseph, Marie de Gaulle was born on the 22 November 1890 and died in November 1970. He Served with distinction in the First World War, despite spending the final two years as a POW. In spite of his reputation as an arrogant maverick, by 1940, he had gained promotion to the rank of general. Unlike most other generals who accepted the terms of the armistice with Nazi Germany, de Gaulle fled to London where, on the 18th June he made his famous speech to the French calling upon them to continue to struggle against Nazi Germany. This solitary act of rebellion is the founding moment of the `Gaullist myth', the belief that de Gaulle embodied the true spirit and glory of France.

To many after the war, he remained assciated with this moment and was known as l'homme de juin or celui qui a dit non. His call to resistance allowed France to recover some form of dignity after the humiliation of military defeat, poliitcal collapse and collaboration with Nazi occupation. When de Gaulle entered Paris in August 1944 at the head of an army of liberation he cemented his reputation as the saviour of France.

For 16 months de Gaulle was the head of a coalition government formed of Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats. In 1946 he resigned as head of government and spent the next 12 years in a sort of political exile during which time he wrote his memoires. It would take another war - this time in Algeria - to bring him back to power on his own terms in 1958. Although de Gaulle's relationship with the French had been based on war, for the next ten years he led a country at peace that grew in confidence and prosperity.

French Cinema and the Occupation during the Gaullist Era

Between 1944 and 1986 it has been estimated that 200 French films or French co-productions had been made with the setting of Occupied France. Robert Besson's Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956) and René Clément's Le Père tranquille (1946).

Resistance as heroes, French collaborators were rare and were portrayed an abnormal - wierdos - and traitors rather than French fascists motivitate by ideology.

May 1968: demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins

Death of De Gaulle in 1970, death of Pompidou in 1974 end of the Gaullist dominance

The father is dead, time to take stock of the inheritance
François Nourissier

Critical Responses

Lacombe Lucien was a popular film at the French box office in 1974 - it came 6th in the year of Emmanuelle - but the film was not without its critics. In fact, the film caused something of a controversy in France, both Left and Right, who objected to its broadly sympathetic depiction of a collaborator. The problem with the film, in the eyes of many critics, was its ambiguous political message.

As one might expect, criticism of the film came from both the left and from the Gaullist right. Detractors of the film took different positions: Gaullists saw themselves as defenders of a historical tradition that had been called into question; the left saw a broadly sympathetic portrait of a sale collabo, a dirty collaborator. Lacombe Lucien was a film that was too stylized and apolitical. Many claimed the film privIieged style over substance - clothes, interior décor, the jazz of Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grapelli and the Hot Club de France Lucien's actions were governed by chance not choice. The film appeared to deny any form of political or patriotic motivation. Lucien was apolitical and indifferent to patriotism. He is as indifferent to political speeches of the Vichy and of resistance. He loves a Jewish woman, uses a poster of Pétain for target practice and shoots a German soldier to facilitate her escape. And yet, he is a collaborator, a man who denounces and hounds resistors. The film was not simply politically incoherent, it was offensive to the memory of those who had made choices.

This controversy stems in part from France's difficulty in coming to terms with this particular period in its history. The French historian, Henry Rousso, this difficulty in coming to terms with the realities of Occupied France a name: the `Vichy syndrome' (le syndrome de Vichy). Rousso defined it thus:

Le syndrome de Vichy est l'ensemble hétérogènes des symptômes, des manifestations, en particulier dans la vie politique, sociale et culturelle, qui révèlent l'existence du traumatisme engendré par l'Occupation, particulièrement lié aux divisions internes, traumatisme qui s'est maintenu, parfois développé, après la fin des événements. (18-19)

The Vichy syndrome consists of a diverse set of symptoms whereby the trauma of the Occupation, and particularly that trauma resulting from internal divisions within France, reveals itself in political, social and cultural life. Since the end of the war, moreover, that trauma has been perpetuated and at times exacerbated. (10)

Malle's Lacombe Lucien was an important event culturally as it marked a key moment in France's difficult coming-to-terms with the so-called années noires of Occupation, a new stage in the `Vichy syndrome'. Alain Resnais' Night and Fog (1955) and, more significantly Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) had also made important steps here.

La mode rétro

Lacombe Lucien: Portrait of a Collaborator

In an interview Louis Malle claimed that Lucien was a `young man of today' (`Avec son amoralité candide et son appétit de vivre en ignorant toute idéologie, le Lacombe Lucien de 1944 est un jeune homme d'aujourd'hui').

Louis Malle had initially planned a film called Le Milicien inspired by the political situation in Mexico in which young working-class men were recruited into the Government militia to combat civil unrest. Malle also considered a film about les harkis, that is to say those Algerians who fought alongside the French against the FLN who sought to liberate Algeria from French colonization. Growing interest in the idea of collaboration, not yet sure that he wanted to explore the nature of French collaboration. However, the release of Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity (1971) a documentary film dealing with French collaboration, drew him to consider making a feature film. Whlist walking in the small village of Figeac, near Toulouse, Malle hears a Beethoven piano sonata being played and he starts to imagine a film in which a young Jewish girl is being held a virtual prisoner in her home. He contacts Patrick Modiano and they begin work on the screenplay. Talks to local garage owner in town about what he was doing and the garage owner tells him about a man called Hercule, whose life was not entirely dissimilar to Lucien's.

The Attractions of Fascism

Hayward argues that the film is, in fact, about the attractions of fascism, of collaboration (Hayward: 1993 p.251). Fascism about fulfilling a power vacuum. It's a film which, despite criticism from the Left, is about the attractions of certain forms of fascism. It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the scene in which Lucien is drawn into the murky world of collaboration, we watch Lucien transfixed by the spectacle of contraband being unloaded from a lorry (see Hayward: 1993 p.251). Lucien is the voyeur, a scene which is repeated in different forms throughout the film (Lucien watching a torture scene in the hotel bathroom, watching Jean-Bernard de Voisins and Betty Beaulieu in their open-top car etc.).

The Collaborator as Unlucky

In Lucien, we have the portryal of the collaborator as innocent: an ideological void filled by others. He falls in love with France, the daughter of Albert Horn, a Jewish tailor on the run, despite her Jewishness. In spite of his empty mouthings of the threat Jews, Bolsheviks and others pose, Lucien is apparently indifferent to political argument.

Gender Issues

The film's title is an interesting one. It is, of course eponymous as the main character of the film is a young man called Lucien Lacombe. By inverting surname and first name - common in France in schools, the army and otyher institutions, Lucien's subordinate status as a working-class man is underlined. He will always be `hailed', the subject of somebody else's orders and definiitons. Lucien is powerless.

In contrast to the powerlessness he experiences all around him - he works as a cleaner in a hospice, his mother is having an affair with another landowning farmer while his father is in a POW camp, the local schoolteacher rejects his application to join the local resistance group.

What joining the Milice offers Lucien is the chance to become somebody, to exercise his control and power over others. Power is symbolized by the gun he is allowed to carry and use as a milicien.

Seeks to humiliate and emasculate other men in revenge for the humiliation he experienced as part of his everyday life.

Swas to Monsieur Horn that sewing is a job for women, humiliates a resistant by taping his mouth shut. Unusually tense scene - will Lucien `enter history to save the resistor or to become a fuully-fledged collabo? In the end he simply asks him why he used the tu/toi form with him. In contrast to the powerlessness he experiences all around him - he works as a cleaner in a hospice, his mother is having an affair with another landowning farmer while his father is in a POW camp, the local schoolteacher rejects his application to join the local resistance group.

The Collaborator as Class Antagonist

During a round up of a suspected resister, Lucien destroys a wealthy young man's model ship. He has a relationship with a young middle-class woman with whom he could never had entertained any hopes of seeing if the situation had been different

Casting of Pierre Blaise, not a profesisonal actor and a young man of peasant background, not unlike Lucien. Malle wanted not a middle-class student type - like himself but someone who would live the role, close the gap between actor and character (French: 1993 p. 119). Strange unknowability about him: motives obscure, inherent violence. Malle wanted his Lucien to have the accent and the look of the young rural kids of the region, he didn't want some middle class drama student from Toulouse.

"un vrai sauvage"(French p.119). Blaise left school at 14 and worked as a lumberjack/woodcutter with his older brother. Helped Malle and Mondiano rewrite dialogue if he had trouble with a line. Malle understood that Blaise understood the character of Lucien better than him. Blaise didn't actually want a career in acting - he did the job for the money. His mother pushed him to go for the role when it was advertized in the local press.

Lucien's peasant background is played on in much of the film. We see him shooting birds with his catapault, shooting rabbits with his father's shotgun, catching chickens and breaking their necks with his bare hands. The suggestion is there, that Lucien is able to make the transition from peasant to killer because of the innate violence within him and his indifference to suffering, animal or human. Because Lucien loves hunting, it is easy for him to make the transition from tracking down and killing animals to tracking down and killing men.

Lucien is indifferent to all ideology, indifferent to public events. He follows an essentially private and individual agenda as opposed to a politically or ideologically motivated agenda.

Lucien is a "political imbecile[s]" (Jankowski:1991 p.466)

Jean-Paul Sarte's criticism of Lacombe Lucien was that it was offensive to the working class, by showing a politically uneducated young man as `typical' of collaboration, it obscured the real class that profited directly from that collaboration, a collaboration that was primarily economic, i.e. the bourgeoisie (Jankowski: 1991 p.479).

E the ruling circles, who for class reasons acclaimed the divine surprise of 1940, sought collaboration and profited from it" Sartre

The end of the film is characterized by a number of unusual postoral scenes of Lucien, France and her grandmother enjoying nature as they escape both the Germans and then the French resistance. In a pastoral landscape remote from history, Lucien rediscovers an innocence he lost. Malle seems to suggest that I another time, another country perhaps, Lucien and France might have made a life together. Lucien might have become a hero rather than tried as a collaborator.

Interest in young lovers rather than poolitics because noone lives outside history, and history involves us in making difficult choices. Denies human agency and places the stress on chance.

Filmed in Figeac

Au revoir les enfants, a childhood buddy movie (Austin: 1996 p.33)

Refuses to demonize Lucien, shows him as a `young man of today' (1974)

Louis Malle's Lacombe, Lucien (1974) is the story of a young peasant from south-western France during the Occupation (1940-44). Rejected by the Resistance, who he initially approaches, he finds himself involved with the local Gestapo and their French collaborators.

It is whilst working with the Gestapo, that Lucien finds himself, with the same lack of intent and reflection that led him to join the fascist militia, fall in love with and begin a sexual relationship with a young Jewish woman called France.
too young, too unreliable, not sufficiently trustworthy

EUR213: The Backward Glance: Representations of European History

Louis Malle: Lacombe Lucien (1974)

Lecture

? Introduction and Context
? Critical Responses to Lacombe Lucien
? Lacombe Lucien: Portrait of a Collaborator
? Collaboration, Gender and Class

Seminar

? Selected Extracts

Essay Question

What do you understand by Louis Malle's claim that Lacombe Lucien is a film that challenges the Gaullist "official history" of Occupied France? Discuss with detailed reference to the film.