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Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France

A war of words

Agnès Humbert
Bloomsbury, 370pp, £14.99,

Caroline Moorehead

Wednesday, 17th September 2008

Resistance: Memoirs of Occupied France, by Agnès Humbert

Paradoxically, wrote Jean Paul Sartre, never had French intellectuals been so free as they were under the German occupation, for having lost all normal rights to speak out, each was forced to question every thought and ask himself: ‘Rather than death...?’ In practice, most of the writers and academics who remained in France after 1940 simply kept their heads down and went on with their own work. Sartre himself had several of his plays staged. There was, however, a number of these men and women for whom collaboration of any kind was immediately intolerable. One of these was a 46-year-old art historian and ethnographer, divorced mother of two adult sons, called Agnès Humbert.

The Musée de l’Homme was one of Paris’s most prestigious museums. On its staff, and working closely with it, was a group of gifted curators, scientists, teachers and writers, politically to the Left, who, discovering a shared sense of fury against the invader, decided to set up one of the first resistance networks in occupied France. Apart from Humbert, there were Boris Vildé, a specialist in the polar regions, Anatole Lewitsky, a world expert on Siberian shamanism, and Jean Cassou, a celebrated cultural and political figure of prewar France. At a time when most Parisians were still stunned by the rapidity with which France had fallen, they began to meet to exchange news learnt from BBC radio broadcasts, write summaries, and produce and distribute pamphlets and flyers. Soon, anti-German and anti-Vichy material was to be seen pasted on walls, scattered throughout the metro, tucked into the windscreens of parked cars and plastered throughout universities and schools. In November, they started a newspaper, Résistance.

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Dr. Henrik Eger

September 19th, 2008 2:44pm

Anyone who was part of the German occupation of France or anyone who lived in France during that time, feel free to get in touch. My father was in charge of the press in Cherbourg, later in Paris, and I only recently found quite a few documents, some of which became a docudrama, called METRONOME TICKING.

However, I have planned more plays and a documentation. He wrote about the collaboration with leading lights in France, appalling to read, yet very much part of the reality at the time. Perhaps Brecht said it best: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral" (Stuffing oneself before morals).

Feel free to contact me at any time: www.henrikeger.com