Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance

Germaine Tillion, Lucie Aubrac, and the Politics of Memories of the French Resistance
Author: Donald Reid
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2009-03-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443807222

Germaine Tillion, Geneviève de Gaulle Anthonioz, Lucie Aubrac, and Raymond Aubrac were among a small number of French men and women who made the decision to resist early in the Occupation. In the summer of 1940, Marc Bloch analyzed the society in which he lived in order to identify and affirm allegiance to a France truly at odds with that which was taking shape in Vichy. Bloch died in the Resistance, but his life would take on new meanings in the collective memories of postwar France. Confrontation with the Aubracs’ account of their refusal to accept the unacceptable became another important way the French engaged with the Resistance and its legacy. The acts Tillion took during the French-Algerian War and de Gaulle Anthonioz took when confronted with poverty in the France of the trentes glorieuses, were of a piece with the radical nature of their earlier decision to resist. Evocation of the Resistance provided a basis for France to reconstitute itself with honor after the war. Yet memory of the Resistance could also pose difficult issues for future generations. Those who came of age in 1968 grappled with the memory of the intrepid resisters of the first years of the war, whose decision to resist stood as an inspiration and a challenge. Historians, with the imperative to take the mandate to narrate the past from historical actors, to make resisters figures of history, developed complex relationships with those who had resisted. The essays in this collection address how resisters made sense of the wartime and postwar world in terms of their resistance, and how others made sense of the Resistance itself and its legacy by engaging with resisters and their histories.

Resistance Heroism and the End of Empire

Resistance Heroism and the End of Empire
Author: Keren Chiaroni
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315396092

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Information -- Frontispiece -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Portrait of a rebel -- Notes -- 1 Dramatis personae -- Émile and Armande -- The paternal branch -- The maternal branch -- Éluard and Picasso: poetry and a portrait -- Marriage and motherhood: Pierre and Fabienne -- Recovery of mind: Lebovici and Kestemberg -- Watch and tell: Louis Aragon, Gaston Monmousseau, Andre Stil, Étienne Fajon and Nguyên Dinh Thi -- Notes -- 2 Defining features: Riffaud and the Resistance -- Resistance as a philosophy of life: the duty to disobey -- Life in the occupied zone -- The sanatorium of Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet -- 1941-1943 Paris: the 'Francs-Tireurs et Partisans' and the 'army of crime' -- 1944: the shooting of a German officer - absolute revolt and its consequences -- 'To the Barricades!' The siege of the Place de la République and the liberation of a city -- Uniforms, medals and a rebel army -- Notes -- 3 Vietnam: A love story -- 'Il faut regarder!': the Gestapo order that motivated a career -- Ho Chi Minh at Fontainebleau: an open invitation -- Berlin 1951: the 'Vietnamese Gregory Peck' -- 1954: Dien Bien Phu, the Geneva Agreement and the withdrawal of French troops -- 1955: the beginning and end of a 'belle histoire' -- 1964: in the jungle with the maquis Viet Cong -- 'Armées de l'air': killer bees and the bombing raids on village schools -- 1966: the Camlo air raids and reunion with Nguyen Thi -- 1969: the death of Ho Chi Minh - a tribute and three testaments -- The Association of Friends of Vietnam and France -- Notes -- 4 Algeria and France: A crime passionnel -- Introduction -- The Alger républicain, 1952 -- 'Orleansville SOS' and the Toussaint Rebellion of 1954

Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender

Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender
Author: Lara R. Curtis
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2019-10-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030312429

This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II.

Political Survivors

Political Survivors
Author: Emma Kuby
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 423
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501732811

In 1949, as Cold War tensions in Europe mounted, French intellectual and former Buchenwald inmate David Rousset called upon fellow concentration camp survivors to denounce the Soviet Gulag as a "hallucinatory repetition" of Nazi Germany's most terrible crime. In Political Survivors, Emma Kuby tells the riveting story of what followed his appeal, as prominent members of the wartime Resistance from throughout Western Europe united to campaign against the continued existence of inhumane internment systems around the world. The International Commission against the Concentration Camp Regime brought together those originally deported for acts of anti-Nazi political activity who believed that their unlikely survival incurred a duty to bear witness for other victims. Over the course of the next decade, these pioneering activists crusaded to expose political imprisonment, forced labor, and other crimes against humanity in Franco's Spain, Maoist China, French Algeria, and beyond. Until now, the CIA's secret funding of Rousset's movement has remained in the shadows. Kuby reveals this clandestine arrangement between European camp survivors and American intelligence agents. She also brings to light how Jewish Holocaust victims were systematically excluded from Commission membership – a choice that fueled the group's rise, but also helped lead to its premature downfall. The history that she unearths provides a striking new vision of how wartime memory shaped European intellectual life and ideological struggle after 1945, showing that the key lessons Western Europeans drew from the war centered on "the camp," imagined first and foremost as a site of political repression rather than ethnic genocide. Political Survivors argues that Cold War dogma and acrimony, tied to a distorted understanding of WWII's chief atrocities, overshadowed the humanitarian possibilities of the nascent anti-concentration camp movement as Europe confronted the violent decolonizing struggles of the 1950s.

Transatlantic Antifascisms

Transatlantic Antifascisms
Author: Michael Seidman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108417787

The first comprehensive scholarly account of antifascism, analysing its development in Spain, France, Britain and the USA.

Decolonizing Emotions in French Algeria

Decolonizing Emotions in French Algeria
Author: Christiane-Marie Abu Sarah
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2024-08-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0755652924

Alongside the diplomatic struggles of the early Cold War, European politicians worked to shape emotions about the postwar order-advocating fear of communism and hope for postwar recovery. In this context, the French Empire in North Africa emerged as one important emotional battleground, where Algerian nationalists and anti-colonial campaigners challenged French narratives about imperial pride and native hysteria. During the Algerian War (1954–1962), emotions thus became a pivotal part of the independence struggle. Accordingly, Decolonizing Emotions tracks affective politics during the revolution, focusing on members of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), Combattants de la libération (CDL), and Jeune Résistance. Delving into the manifestos, poetry, and personal diaries of anti-colonial activists, the book reveals a rich world of transgressive sentiments, emotional exile, and affective border-crossings. The stories that surface show how Algerians used biopower to combat an affective regime that refused native populations the right to be angry. The book further chronicles how Europeans complicated ideas of humanitarian pity and confronted the French production of political apathy. It is a history that holds modern relevance, speaking to contemporary debates over race relations and national pride, the pathologizing of Muslim emotions, and the contested process of how myths die (demythologization).

French Mediterraneans

French Mediterraneans
Author: Patricia M. E. Lorcin
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2016-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0803288778

While the Mediterranean is often considered a distinct, unified space, recent scholarship on the early modern history of the sea has suggested that this perspective is essentially a Western one, devised from the vantage point of imperial power that historically patrolled the region’s seas and controlled its ports. By contrast, for the peoples of its southern shores, the Mediterranean was polymorphous, shifting with the economic and seafaring exigencies of the moment. Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century the idea of a monolithic Mediterranean had either been absorbed by or imposed on the populations of the region. In French Mediterraneans editors Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard offer a collection of scholarship that reveals the important French element in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century creation of the singular Mediterranean. These essays provide a critical study of space and movement through new approaches to think about the maps, migrations, and margins of the sea in the French imperial and transnational context. By reconceptualizing the Mediterranean, this volume illuminates the diversity of connections between places and polities that rarely fit models of nation-state allegiances or preordained geographies.

The Cinema of Rithy Panh

The Cinema of Rithy Panh
Author: Leslie Barnes
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2021-07-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1978809824

Born in 1964, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh grew up in the midst of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal reign of terror, which claimed the lives of many of his relatives. After escaping to France, where he attended film school, he returned to his homeland in the late 1980s and began work on the documentaries and fiction films that have made him Cambodia’s most celebrated living director. The fourteen essays in The Cinema of Rithy Panh explore the filmmaker’s unique aesthetic sensibility, examining the dynamic and sensuous images through which he suggests that “everything has a soul.” They consider how Panh represents Cambodia’s traumatic past, combining forms of individual and collective remembrance, and the implications of this past for Cambodia’s transition into a global present. Covering documentary and feature films, including his literary adaptations of Marguerite Duras and Kenzaburō Ōe, they examine how Panh’s attention to local context leads to a deep understanding of such major themes in global cinema as justice, imperialism, diaspora, gender, and labor. Offering fresh takes on masterworks like The Missing Picture and S-21 while also shining a light on the director’s lesser-known films, The Cinema of Rithy Panh will give readers a new appreciation for the boundless creativity and ethical sensitivity of one of Southeast Asia’s cinematic visionaries.

Justice in Lyon

Justice in Lyon
Author: Richard J. Golsan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2022-06-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487534175

The trial of former SS lieutenant and Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie was France’s first trial for crimes against humanity. Known as the "Butcher of Lyon" during the Nazi occupation of that city from 1942 to 1944, Barbie tortured, deported, and murdered thousands of Jews and Resistance fighters. Following a lengthy investigation and the overcoming of numerous legal and other obstacles, the trial began in 1987 and attracted global attention. Justice in Lyon is the first comprehensive history of the Barbie trial, including the investigation leading up to it, the legal background to the case, and the hurdles the prosecution had to clear in order to bring Barbie to justice. Richard J. Golsan examines the strategies used by the defence, the prosecution, and the lawyers who represented Barbie’s many victims at the trial. The book draws from press coverage, articles, and books about Barbie and the trial published at the time, as well as recently released archival sources and the personal archives of lawyers at the trial. Making the case that, despite the views of its many critics, the Barbie trial was a success in legal, historical, and pedagogical terms, Justice in Lyon details how the trial has had a positive impact on French and international law governing crimes against humanity.

A Companion to the Biopic

A Companion to the Biopic
Author: Deborah Cartmell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2020-01-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1119554810

The most comprehensive reference text of theoretical and historical discourse on the biopic film The biopic, often viewed as the most reviled of all film genres, traces its origins to the early silent era over a century ago. Receiving little critical attention, biopics are regularly dismissed as superficial, formulaic, and disrespectful of history. Film critics, literary scholars and historians tend to believe that biopics should be artistic, yet accurate, true-to-life representations of their subjects. Moviegoing audiences, however, do not seem to hold similar views; biopics continue to be popular, commercially viable films. Even the genre’s most ardent detractors will admit that these films are often very watchable, particularly due to the performance of the lead actor. It is increasingly common for stars of biographical films to garner critical praise and awards, driving a growing interest in scholarship in the genre. A Companion to the Biopic is the first global and authoritative reference on the subject. Offering theoretical, historical, thematic, and performance-based approaches, this unique volume brings together the work of top scholars to discuss the coverage of the lives of authors, politicians, royalty, criminals, and pop stars through the biopic film. Chapters explore evolving attitudes and divergent perspectives on the genre with topics such as the connections between biopics and literary melodramas, the influence financial concerns have on aesthetic, social, or moral principles, the merger of historical narratives with Hollywood biographies, stereotypes and criticisms of the biopic genre, and more. This volume: Provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of the biopic and considers how the choice of historical subject reflects contemporary issues Places emphasis on films that portray race and gender issues Explores the uneven boundaries of the genre by addressing what is and is not a biopic as well as the ways in which films simultaneously embrace and defy historical authenticity Examines the distinction between reality and ‘the real’ in biographical films Offers a chronological survey of biopics from the beginning of the 20th century A Companion to the Biopic is a valuable resource for researchers, scholars, and students of history, film studies, and English literature, as well as those in disciplines that examine interpretations of historical figures