H-France Review Vol. 1 (March 2001), No. 5
Des Terroristes à la retraite. 1983/France/Color. Director:
Mosco Boucault. Studio: Zek Productions. Running Time: 84 min.
Review by Patrick Young.
The January 2001 release of the film “Terrorists in Retirement” (“Des
Terroristes à la retraite”), directed by Mosco Boucault, brings to American
theaters one of the more controversial treatments of France’s wartime
experience to appear in recent years. At the time of its release, in 1983,
the film provoked such a firestorm of dispute that its broadcast on French
television was delayed for nearly two years. Prior to this year’s re-release,
the film’s first and only American showing was at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York in April 1999. Having just run in New York, the film will
move on to other cities in the coming weeks. In both its representation
of the Resistance and Resistance activity, and in the heated controversy
surrounding it, the film will stimulate historians of modern France, particularly
those interested in the changing politics of French memory in the last
few decades.
The subject of the film is a group of foreign-born, mostly Jewish partisans,
who, as members of the Communist Party’s Main d’oeuvre immigré (MOI),
formed into special detachments of the Francs-tireurs-partisans
(FTP) to engage in acts of direct violent resistance against the French
and German authorities during World War II. As the film opens, a 1944
German newsreel triumphantly recounts the recent capture, trial, and execution
of a group of these partisans, the so-called Groupe Manouchian,
named for the Armenian poet who served as its leader. The clip shows the
famous Affiche rouge, posted all over Paris during the trial, prominently
displaying the names, nationalities, and faces of the accused beneath
the headline of “Liberators?” At a time of mounting crisis for the occupation,
the intention behind this propaganda drive was manifestly clear: to discredit
the Resistance before French opinion as communist and, even more, as foreign
and Jewish.
Boucault seizes this poster as a sort of surviving artifact, inviting
exploration of a current of Resistance activity long marginalized in official
and popular memory of the period. He seeks out those veterans of the cell
who managed to survive the Gestapo crackdowns of late 1943 and early 1944,
finding them living ordinary, even marginal lives, working mostly as tailors
in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. In a style reminiscent of the two
most prominent French films on the memory of World War II and the occupation,
Marcel Ophuls’ “The Sorrow and the Pity” and Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,”
the narrative emerges primarily through exchanges of witnesses with the
director, the latter attempting to trigger buried or partial memory about
events taking place forty years ago. Sketching (probably too) briefly
the background of their immigration to France, in the twenties and thirties,
and their deepening communist engagements, the interviews center principally
upon the decision to hazard acts of violent resistance to Nazi occupation.
In addition to having the veterans recount their memories of the period,
and their often-conflictual feelings about undertaking such dramatic and
risky actions, Boucault actually has them dramatically reproduce those
actions. The effect is a peculiar one, especially at the beginning, as
one watches these now-graying and thoroughly ordinary men reenact their
bold assassinations and terrorist bombings on the streets and subways
of contemporary Paris. Yet what seems at first faintly awkward, almost
closer to slapstick than historical reconstruction, grows more affecting
as one continues to watch. The peculiar disjunction between the extraordinary
actions reenacted and the very quotidian contemporary setting throws en
jeu the issue of heroism and heroization, and this problematic remains
central throughout the film. Boucault studiously avoids the insertion
of newsreel clips, newspaper headlines or the like, and with them, perhaps,
the irresistible pull toward the mythic and heroic which had long circumscribed
representation of the Resistance. It is as if he wishes to maintain this
tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary, as a commentary upon
the nature of Resistance heroism and of a heroism denied.
This is not to say that Boucault wishes to question the heroism of Resistance
activity. To the contrary, the patient accumulation of detail in the interviews
has the effect of conferring the heroic mantle of resistance upon individuals
long denied it. The director, himself of Bulgarian Jewish origin, has
described as one of his motivations in making the film a desire to restore
agency to Jews, in a historical context long defined by Jewish victimization.
This the film certainly accomplishes; yet the heroism that emerges is
a peculiar one, perhaps for remaining so understated throughout. The principals
maintain a self-effacing quality, their recountings filled with memories
of doubt, confusion, and even bumbling. Like Ophuls and Lanzmann, Boucault
is fully attentive to the mise en scène for the interviews: he
has these narratives of courageous abandon before the most extreme risk
proceed amidst the most ordinary of circumstances, in some cases as the
raconteurs work away at their sewing machines. In doing so, the
film does not simply reproduce Resistance history in the heroic-mythic
register, instead maintaining a distance from the seemingly inevitable
pull toward sacralization.
The Controversy
There is little in the first two-thirds of the film to suggest why such
heated controversy accompanied the film immediately upon its release,
and then for two years thereafter. For the duration of this period, from
1983-1985, “Terrorists in Retirement” was more news event than film, the
subject of often acrimonious dispute in the French media. The uproar derived
primarily from the film’s contention that the eventual capture and execution
by the Gestapo of these veterans’ former comrades in the “Groupe Manouchian”
might have been facilitated by the Communist leadership itself, a willing
sacrifice by the party as it attempted to cultivate nationalist credibility
in the impending post-war political settlement. These suspicions center
around the winter of 1943-4, as the Gestapo began to undertake a counter-offensive
against the Parisian FTP-MOI, identifying its members for arrest. It was
common practice for the Communist Resistance leadership, upon being alerted
to imminent crackdowns, to relocate its fighters to safer areas, away
from Paris. The film advances the strong suggestion that the clandestine
central command of the Party knew of the impending danger, but nevertheless
refused to take the targets out of harm’s way.
This accusation was not entirely new when the film was finally shown
for the first time in 1985, having first been floated by the CNRS historian
Philippe Robrieux in 1984, on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary
of the Manouchian Group’s trial and execution. While Robrieux’s claim
triggered some outrage on the part of the PCF and certain Resistance survivors,
it was the prospect of television broadcast of these charges to a mass
public which brought the matter to a head. The decision of the network
Antenne 2 finally to broadcast the film on June 2, 1985, prompted a full-blown
affaire in the French press during the spring and early summer
of 1985, with the Communist Party in particular voicing outrage over the
accusations. L’Humanité judged the film “defamatory,” one instance
of a deeper campaign of anti-communist slander then being conducted in
the press and on television.
The spring and summer of 1985 was, of course, an especially charged period
for memory of World War II and the Resistance. The fortieth anniversary
of the Liberation provoked a new cycle of commemoration and controversy,
including the opening of an official Museum of the Resistance in Champigny
and the release of Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” as well as the much-disputed laying
of wreathes at Bitburg. In this climate, it is hardly surprising that
the broadcast of Boucault’s film should have so polarized French opinion.
With argument over the film filling the papers and air waves, in May and
June of 1985, the French High Authority on audio-visual communications
convened a “Jury of Honor,” consisting of five surviving members of the
Resistance (all non-communist, and including Raymond and Lucie Aubrac),
to advise it on the advisability of broadcasting the film. Unanimously,
the jury voted that the allegations of the film were unproven and ultimately
defamatory, “an operation of disinformation with obvious and shocking
political intent.” Its members signed a statement declaring that, were
they in charge of the network, they would not allow transmission of the
film. Antenne 2 followed this recommendation, postponing broadcast of
the film one month, to July 2, and then appending both a presentation
of historical context beforehand, and a debate of concerned parties afterwards.
In the interim, vitriol continued to flow in the French press, with advocates
of the film denouncing the delay as “censorship” and evidence of cowardice
before the bullying of the PCF, and opponents of the film cataloguing
its inaccuracies and denouncing its thinly-veiled political agenda.
Resistance Represented
Viewed through a historical optic, Boucault’s representation of the Resistance
testifies to broader shifts in French memory of the années noires.
The crumbling of the fragile post-war consensus of memory in France, beginning
in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, could not but influence understanding
and representation of the Resistance. Prior to this “breaking of the mirror,”
to borrow Henry Rousso’s phrase, memory of the actual Resistance had often
been subsumed in the larger myth of a france résistante, of a country
united in a spirit of resistance, if not always in actions of resistance.
Promoted primarily by Charles de Gaulle, and by the French Communist Party,
though widely accepted across the political spectrum, this version of
the immediate past served to repress--however imperfectly, as Rousso amply
documents--the fratricidal divisions at the core of France’s wartime experience
and provided a framework for postwar republican renewal and economic modernization.
Of course, memory and commemoration of the Resistance, or a certain version
of the Resistance, played a vital role in the building of this consensual
past and future. The images and stories surrounding the Resistance provided
an updated foundation myth for the French republic, after its startling
failure in 1939. Fully incorporated into the school curriculum and in
official commemorative culture as part of the civic catechism, the Resistance
became a vital shared reference point for the French. The elevation of
Jean Moulin as the transcendent figure of resistance--culminating in the
solemn transfer of his remains to the Pantheon in 1964--was particularly
emblematic of this myth-making impulse in post-war French political culture.
As first Ophuls’ “Sorrow and the Pity” and then Robert Paxton’s Vichy
France prompted radical reconsideration of the wartime years. It was
primarily the Vichy regime and questions of collaboration which attracted
a suddenly “obsessive” (to use Rousso’s term) attention. At the center
of French remembering in the 1960’s, the Resistance would only come back
to the center of memory politics in the 1980’s. As with other parts of
the wartime experience, the terms of understanding and memory of the Resistance
altered significantly with the lifting of the mythic veil of the Gaullist
period. Denuded, at least partially, of the mythic and political weight
it formerly had to carry, the Resistance has emerged, over the last twenty
or so years, as more complex, historical, and contested, a shift signaled
by Boucault’s film and the controversy surrounding it.
The positive aspect of this shift is apparent in Boucault’s more nuanced
and in some ways more realistic depiction of the Resistance. If the mythologizing
of the past in the postwar period had depended upon certain elisions,
one of these was surely the minimizing of the very real differences between
Resistance groups. The Resistance was always a very complex, even divided
movement, a fact often lost in the period of Gaullist remembering. Uncertainty,
chance, and political confusion often defined Resistance activity, far
more than well-coordinated and unitary direction from above. The film
also attests to the importance of the socially marginal in the drama of
occupation and resistance, as the widely-shared impression of social rupture
enabled new actors and new actions. Just as enthusiastic collaboration
often attracted those positioned somehow on the social margins, so too
did the most active resistance often fall to figures such as these in
the film, forcibly separated from family, and increasingly subjected to
exclusionist political designs. The surviving veterans speak often of
having little to lose, of violent resistance being a natural, even inescapable
decision.
Boucault’s film symptomizes the shift from a consensual, all-encompassing
memory of the Resistance to more plural, perhaps more partial, even private
ones. In The Vichy Syndrome, Henry Rousso details the emergence
of a “Jewish Memory”, beginning in the 1970’s, as French Jews made a particular
mnemonic claim upon the events of World War II. While Lanzmann’s film
would mark the pinnacle of this current of remembering, “Terrorists in
Retirement” advances a similar, if less epic, claim to a specifically
Jewish memory of the experience of war. In subtle and less subtle ways,
Boucault foregrounds the Jewishness of his subjects, at times at the expense
of their communist commitments. His insistence upon filming them working
away as tailors while being interviewed affirms their identity not simply
as workers, but as Jewish immigrant workers, their lives a continuity
stretching from Eastern to Western Europe. The final sequence of the film
makes this claim even more forcefully, pausing rather ominously upon contemporary
shots of the desecrated graves of a Jewish cemetery. Such gestures were
not at all incidental to the film’s appeal, nor to its controversy: among
those arguing most passionately for the television broadcast of the film
were groups of surviving relatives of deportees, who lauded its depiction
of Jews “not simply going to slaughter, but actually fighting on behalf
of liberty and the dignity of all men”, to quote a statement of one such
group. The assertion of a partial claim to memory, like the larger claim
to specific or multiple identities (as opposed to being exclusively “French”)
is of course always a problematic business in France. Rousso himself identifies
“Jewish Memory” as a form of “obsession,” with its suggestion of pathology,
and expresses concern over the emergence of a “Judeo-centric” claim upon
memory.
The vociferous response of the PCF to the film similarly testifies to
this fragmentation of memory in the last twenty years. That the party’s
posture toward the film should be so defensive is understandable, as it
had long derived much prestige from its deep association with the Resistance
and the Resistance myth. Combating the film and its charges became a larger
defense of the party against an anti-communist slander suddenly acceptable
in the media. The disgust of the party at its return to political marginality
-- after having served alongside the Socialists from 1982-1984--and at
the increasingly moderate course taken by the Mitterrand government is
certainly never far from the surface in its condemnations of the film.
Articles denouncing the film in L’Humanité dwell constantly upon
the gross affront that the “parti des fusillés” should be so impugned,
that there should be so little hesitation in attacking the heroic memory
of the party. Here again, a formerly consensual memory gives way to deeply
conflicting memory claims, often based in the political needs of the present.
The question of how the retreat from communism and communism’s decline
and fall-- as both world-historical event and, for many, as deeply personal
experience--has influenced personal and collective memory of the war years
is an important one that deserves to be further pursued.
It seems worth asking, as well, how exactly the Resistance was “made
French” both during and after the period of the war, a question raised
powerfully by this film. Boucault suggests that the indifference, and
perhaps even treachery, of communist Resistance leaders in the face of
known threats to the Manouchian cell is explained by the desire of those
leaders to eliminate association with foreign and Jewish elements in the
ranks. With the post-war settlement looming, it is alleged, the Communist
Resistance sought to associate itself with more “French” sounding names,
and that, to quote Philippe Ganier-Raymond, one of two Resistance historians
appearing in the film, “It would have been exceedingly embarrassing for
the French Communist Party to have to reveal that their Resistance heroes
were not grassroots Frenchmen but people with names like Mitzflicker,
Weissberg and Kojitski.”
The veracity of this accusation aside, it is worthwhile to consider how
the construction of the Resistance and its myth -- and the Resistance
was never free of mythic content, even during the war itself--always proceeded
in line with certain specific codings and exclusions. To assume the burden
of so profoundly representing France, and in particular republican France,
the Resistance had to assert its continuity with certain aspects of the
French past. Certainly, for example, the Resistance re-girded the notion
of public virtue, updating the revolutionary iconography of the citizen-at-arms;
so, too, did it serve at times as a story of masculine renewal, a heroic
reversal of the French army’s debacle in 1940. As the film implies, the
recasting of resistance as unifying myth invariably privileged certain
currents of resistance, and certain Resistance figures, over others.
What of the future course of Resistance remembering and representation?
Controversy surrounding the Resistance has, if anything, intensified since
the release of Boucault’s film in the mid 1980’s. If the lifting of the
sacred aura formerly surrounding the Resistance and central Resistance
figures has in some instances allowed for a more nuanced historical understanding
of the movement, it has also given rise to iconoclastic impulses to tear
down further the remaining vestiges of the old myths. New misgivings in
particular have been directed at the figure of Jean Moulin, taking the
form of accusations of his being a communist agent during his work in
the Resistance. First advanced in the 1970’s by Resistance veteran Henri
Frenay, such accusations found a new life in a 1993 book by Thierry Wolton
and the accompanying scandal in the French media. The circumstances surrounding
Moulin’s arrest, torture, and death also gave rise to controversy, beginning
during the Barbie trial in 1983, but then resurfacing in the late nineties
in the so-called “Affaire Aubrac,” in which two of Moulin’s closest associates
struggled to clear themselves of suspicions of having betrayed him to
the Gestapo. Played out fully in the French media, with often-acrimonious
interventions by Resistance veterans, historians and current politicians,
these scandals mark the latest episodes in France’s ongoing reconsideration
of its wartime experience. Perhaps these are best considered the birth
pangs of a new understanding of the wartime past as the Resistance ceases
to be such a living issue and makes its passage into history. As remaining
witnesses--who have been among the more influential custodians of wartime
memory--pass from the scene, professional historians and the popular media
likely will continue to wage turf battles over how the period is understood
and represented. It is not yet clear whether the Vichy years are fated
to remain for the French, again borrowing from Rousso, “un passé qui ne
passe pas.”
Patrick Young, pry3@earthlink.net
Copyright © 2001 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 1 (March 2001), No. 5
ISSN 1553-9172
