The Catholic Church, especially at the top level, had little to be proud of in supporting Pétain’s vicious Vichy measures against Jews, but the rector of Louis Malle’s Carmelite boarding school hid three Jewish boys, as Louis commemorated in his film, Au Revoir les Enfants. Protestants, however, with Huguenot memories, were more generally protective of fugitive Jews.
While alien Jews in particular were pitilessly hounded, Guy de Rothschild, a Proustian toff and a hunting crony of the Marshal’s, swanned openly round the ‘Free Zone’. Later, he was fast-tracked for immigration into the US. Yet all his mother’s relatives died in Auschwitz.
A friend of mine went with her misguidedly law-abiding father to register as Jews at the local prefecture and then waited for some three years, in dread of the arrest that never came. Inefficiency has its graces.
Written evidence does not always tell the full story. An extant letter shows a Monsieur Cougouaille, allegedly entrusted with the 10-year-old son of Berthe Gheldman, a deported Belgian Jewess, denying all knowledge of the boy. This might seem to illustrate his indifference to the boy’s fate, whereas in fact this particular Français moyen had done all he could to save the mother and succeeded in hiding her son, who survived.
Faits divers are also piquant. The singer Georges Brassens went awol from the BMW works in Bavaria and holed up in a Parisian working-class flat, where he entered into a ménage à trois so durable that he contined to sleep with Jeanne le Bonniec until 1966. The radical politician Henri Queuille started a charcoal business in Neuvic d’Ussel only because young men who worked in that trade were exempt from STO. Fifty years later, his neighbour remembered him doing so, but not that he also became one of the Fourth Republic’s many prime ministers.
Another unlikely true story is that, after the 1943 fall of Mussolini, Italian troops stationed on Corsica lost more men fighting for the liberation of the island (245 of them were killed when they turned against their erstwhile allies) than the Resistance and the Free French invasion force combined.
Repatriated deportees were often ill at ease in their do-nothing family circles. The résistant Hélie de Saint Marc had spent his 20th year in Buchenwald and found that the only relative with whom, as a returnee, he had any fellow-feeling was a cousin who had joined the Vichy Milice in the last stages of the war. Hélie eventually joined the Foreign Legion.
Fernand Braudel argued, after four years in a prison camp during which he wrote his thesis on the Mediterranean under Philip II, that history is best understood in the light of the longue durée, which (by chance?) discounts historical blips, such as France from 1940 to 1944. Yet ‘How different events appear,’ observed Euripides, in Ion, ‘when far away and when seen close at hand.’ Vinen proves his point.
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