Chris Lloyd, author of the HWA Gold Crown Award-winning The Unwanted Dead, talks about his fascination with the German occupation of France and the concepts of resistance and collaboration; topics in which, he says, “the grey areas become shadier” the deeper you look. His novel was selected as Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month for September 2022.
“If the Resistance had suggested something to me, I would have done it without question. But in July and August 1940, I didn’t even know what the Resistance was.”
Those, paraphrased, are the words of notorious Paris collaborator and gangster Henri Lafont at the time of his trial after the end of the Occupation. Through four years of Occupation, he had worked with the Abwehr and the Gestapo, killed and exploited, tortured and extorted, and hunted down Jews and résistants on the orders of his Nazi paymasters.
And in this one observation, delivered philosophically when he was facing the death sentence, he revealed how he could just as easily have been a hero of the Resistance as a villain of collaboration. How just one decision, one throw of the dice, one quirk of timing determined his fate.
His words succinctly sum up my fascination with the era and the concepts of resistance and collaboration. Many years ago, when I wrote my degree thesis on the French Resistance, there were two notions that had a powerful impact on me at the time and that have always stayed with me. One was the existence of deep divisions in what I’d wrongly thought was a united defence against an invader. The other was the very idea of resistance and collaboration.
I became fascinated by what exactly constituted the two concepts. Even at the time, there were huge variations in the interpretation of what resistance meant, hence the factions within the Resistance movement, and deep disagreements about how the people should react to Occupation, hence the degrees of collaboration the population were forced or were willing to undertake.
There were the extremes. The difference between collaborators and collaborationists, the former sometimes forced into it through weight of circumstance or the desire to survive, as opposed to the latter – hard-core right wing activists of the inter-war years and members of the Vichy regime ideologically willing to throw in their lot with Hitler’s Germany.
There were the résistants who knew from day one that their only course was to resist, the résistants de la première heure, such as the Musée de l’Homme group, who produced pamphlets and paid the ultimate price, and the students and schoolchildren who took to the streets to protest.
These often resented the résistants de la dernière heure, the ones who rose up against the Occupier only after the Allies had landed on D-Day, some of whom were arguably the ones biding their time as they’d been told; although it’s true to say that many of them had jumped on the bandwagon as the Allies gained ground, and were often seen as the ones most eager to punish the erstwhile collaborators.
The Resistance itself was the widest of churches. Never the single, unified army of brave civilians whose sole purpose was to carry out daring acts that many films and books have portrayed, the whole notion of resistance had almost as many interpretations of what constituted resistance as it had followers.
In very broad terms, it’s often split into the Gaullist and the Communist camps, but it was far more complex than that. Early movements sprang up from the ranks of socialists and trades unions, army officers, intellectuals and academics, members of far-left and even far-right groups.
Uniting them was never going to be an easy task, especially when they each had a different vision of what resistance meant. This could range from the classic image of the Gaullist Resistance – who saw their role as biding their time, building up a network, ready and in place to rise up against the occupiers when liberation by the Allies began – to the stereotype of the Communist Resistance – eager to commit immediate acts of sabotage and assassination, to harry the Occupier, no matter the cost in terms of German reprisals.
But if the Resistance was a grey area of interpretation, for the vast majority of French people, the ones in-between who were neither active résistants or collaborationists, it was much more so. The question was, what exactly was resistance, and what was collaboration?
This is the idea that has always interested me. If a postman delivers a letter to German headquarters in Paris, does that make him a collaborator? French police were forced to salute German officers. By doing so rather than face the consequences of refusing, which would have achieved little, were they collaborators?
To keep their jobs and put food on the table, many French workers had to work in factories requisitioned by the Occupiers, producing goods for the German war effort. Many did carry out small and brave acts of sabotage, literally throwing a spanner in the works, but how should we judge – if at all – the many more who didn’t? The question becomes whether it is, in fact, survival that is an act of resistance or of collaboration.
And for those who did survive? This is where all the grey areas became disturbingly shadier still in the interpretation. A time when not just the history was rewritten, but the rules by which the history was remembered. The immediate aftermath of liberation in August 1944 was the épuration, the purge of collaborators, and if the divide between resistance and collaboration under the occupation was blurred, the lines became a whole lot more indistinct as differences and old scores were settled and misdemeanours of every shade were brought to account.
In terms of the justice meted out, the épuration saw a mob rule and a rule of law, both of which could be as arbitrary and as random as the other. The mob quickly found its favourite victim in the so-called collabos horizontales, women who had had sex with Germans, providing they weren’t the rich and the famous.
Whereas Coco Chanel, who had spent the war in the Ritz with a German officer and had never hidden her admiration of the Occupiers, was arrested but soon released, working-class women who’d slept with German soldiers weren’t afforded the same leniency.
Many of them, often sex workers who’d had little choice under the Occupation if they’d wanted to feed themselves, suffered public degradation and were paraded through the streets, their heads shaved, and worse.
In the courts, meanwhile, the first person to be sentenced to death in Paris for collaboration was Georges Suarez, a journalist, which set a precedent. The legal system judged writers, broadcasters and journalists far more harshly than it did business owners and bureaucrats. In all, some 160,000 cases were heard, with almost half ending in acquittal, a quarter in prison sentences and another quarter in dégradation nationale. Over 7,000 death sentences were handed down, although just 1,500 of these were actually carried out.
In the streets, the story was different. Figures differ wildly, but it’s thought that some 10,000 people died as a result of summary executions and kangaroo courts. Not all who were guilty went punished, not all who were innocent survived.
It was the final act of confusion and division wrought by the Occupation.
The Unwanted Dead by Chris Lloyd, the first book in the Eddie Giral crime thriller series, was published on 17 September, 2020.
His next Eddie Giral book, Paris Requiem, is out in February 2023.
Chris grew up in Cardiff and, after graduating in Spanish and French, spent 24 years in Catalonia, where he taught English and worked in educational publishing and as a travel writer and translator. He also lived in Grenoble for six months, researching the French Resistance movement. He now lives in his native Wales where he works as a writer and translator.
The Unwanted Dead won the 2021 HWA Gold Crown Award for best historical fiction. Read Chris’s winner’s interview with Historia.
It was also shortlisted for the CWA Historical Dagger Award in 2021.
Features on similar topics include:
An appearance of serenity: the French fashion industry in WWII by Catherine Hokin
The women agents behind the D-Day invasion by Mara Timon
Review: When the Germans Came by Duncan Barrett by Mary Chamberlain
A different kind of WWII resistance by Deborah Swift
Images:
- French Resistance member during the Liberation of Paris, 23th August 1944: Cassowary Colorizations for Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
- Resistance members under arrest, guarded by French militia: Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 146-1989-107-24 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA)
- First issue of the newspaper Résistance, from the Musee de l’Homme group, December 15, 1940: SiefkinDR for Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Paris during the German occupation, Agfacolor photo: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, N 1576 Bild-007 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA)
- A French policeman salutes a German officer at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1978-053-30 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA)
- French women accused of collaboration paraded through the streets of Paris, barefoot, branded on the forehead and heads shaved: Deutsches Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1975-041-10 via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA)
