Memory at the front: the struggle over revolutionary commemoration in occupied France, 1940-1944.

The period of Occupied France presents a striking example of the failure of memory studies thus far to penetrate certain essential questions in French historiography. Despite its paramount importance, the memory of the French Revolution during the Occupation years has received little serious examination. This article argues that the central revolutionary commemoration of le 14 juillet assumed a critical role during the Occupation. Le 14 juillet was the occasion when Vichy, the collaborationists and the Resistance each chose to glorify, qualify or condemn the Revolution. Their respective selected symbols, words, and ceremonies projected narratives of the proper French past and visions for the postwar future that competed for legitimacy. Each year, this anniversary also served to gauge the French public's response to the conflicting manipulations of the Revolution's memory, thereby becoming a vital testing ground for the political direction of the nation. Ultimately, the evolution of the holiday's meaning during the Occupation period had consequences that reached well into the post-war era.

Keywords: le 14 juillet, collaboration, French Revolution, Occupied France, Resistance, Vichy

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The years of the German Occupation and the Vichy regime marked a critical juncture in the history of the memory of the French Revolution in France. Ever since the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the Revolution's memory has occupied a place of seminal importance in French political culture. In the on-going struggle over the meaning of the Revolution, the Occupation period proved to be the climactic and decisive moment of the twentieth century. Amidst the economic and political crises of the 1930s, the republican consensus had withered, and the memory of the Revolution had become highly politicized. At the fall of France in 1940, many of the leading figures and groups of the anti-revolutionary extreme right assumed positions of power and prominence, and the legacy of the French Revolution found itself critically threatened. During the four years that followed, increasingly clear choices of national memory presented themselves to the French people. Almost immediately, the new regime called for a 'return to the soil', encouraged a renewed interest in pre-revolutionary regional and provincial identities, and promoted much closer church-state relations than the republic had ever known. These and other efforts underscored Vichy's decision to anchor its cultural identity in a nostalgic view of old France and its values, treating the Revolution as an unfortunate, finite episode, whose legacy demanded drastic revision. The Resistance, meanwhile, increasingly found that wartime circumstances offered an uncanny opportunity to give the memory of the Revolution a new dynamism that it had failed to carry under the Third Republic. Resisters turned to the celebration of revolutionary figures, values and events as a daily weapon against fascism, a means of attaining legitimacy, and a model for the new revolutionary society that they hoped to found in post-war France.

In this article, I hope to offer a perspective on the Occupation years rarely seen in the recent historiography. Historians of Occupied France have most often argued that the period was characterized by great rupture, continuity or a combination thereof. (1) To the extent that some historians have treated the conflicts of the Occupation years as central, they have largely concentrated on only military battles. (2) Meanwhile, a significant scholarship has emerged on the memory of the Occupation in the post-war period, while the vital role played by various strands of French national memory, in particular those of the French Revolution, during the events of the Second World War, has remained largely unexamined. (3) Ultimately, as we shall see, the years of 1940-44 saw a series of military, political and cultural reckonings with the French past, present and future, that changed for ever how the French people saw their Revolution, their country, and themselves.

I have chosen to focus on the central revolutionary commemoration of le 14 juillet as a crucial site of contestation, while placing its role in the context of the larger memory struggles of the period. (4) Le 14 juillet commemorated both the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the Fete de la Federation of 1790. Revolutionaries regarded the storming of the Bastille as the touchstone moment when the chains of absolutist tyranny were broken; for counter-revolutionaries, however, this event stood as a frightening case of mob violence, the moment when the Revolution had first gone horribly wrong. The Fete de la Federation that took place on 14 July of the following year was a festival organized around the theme of national unity between the king, the National Assembly and the people. The revolutionaries' choice of 14 July for this occasion etched the day in the minds of the French as a dual revolutionary symbol of both liberty and unity, and offered an alternative meaning for a date whose original symbolism counterrevolutionaries found so unsettling. In 1940, even after sixty years as the official fete nationale of the Third Republic, le 14 juillet remained a highly contested site of French national memory.

Corresponding to their larger treatments of the Revolution and French history, Vichy, the Resistance and various collaborationists assigned very different meanings to the day during the Occupation years. For Vichy, it remained a national holiday more by political necessity than by choice. Accordingly, from 1940 to 1942, the new regime transformed le 14 juillet from a celebration of republicanism and liberty into a solemn day for France's war dead. Many of the collaborationists showed more overt hostility, seizing the occasion to harshly demonize and caricature the Revolution, its ideals and its allies. Le 14 juillet of 1942, when Vichy made its last full-scale attempt to utilize the fete nationale to promote its version of 'true French' patriotism, proved to be one of the turning points of the war. Rather than heed the instructions to remain silent that emanated from the government, huge numbers of French people responded to appeals from the Resistance and demonstrated in the streets in celebration of the revolutionary anniversary. For the duration of the war, Resistance leaders continued to fashion le 14 juillet into a unifying representation of the battle for French liberty. They also appropriated the holiday to lay claim to the mantle of 'true French' patriotism and ...