Résistancialisme
'Resistance-ism') is a neologism coined by historian Henry Rousso to describe exaggerated historical memory of the French Resistance during World War II.
[1][2] In particular, résistancialisme refers to exaggerated beliefs about the size and importance of the resistance and anti-German sentiment in German-occupied France in post-war French thinking.
In particular, it was used to describe the belief that resistance was both unanimous and natural during the period, and justify the lack of historiographical interest in the role of French collaboration and the Vichy government.
[2][non-primary source needed] Rousso emphasises that résistancialisme should not be confused with "résistantialisme" (with a "t", literally "Resistor-ism"), which is a pejorative term used by Jean-Marie Desgrange to criticize individuals who retrospectively exaggerated or faked their own involvement in the wartime resistance in an attempt to enhance their own status after the war, for instance François Mitterrand.
For instance, movies such as Les Honneurs de la Guerre (1962) had to be modified several times in order to be released, because the role of the Milice was deemed too important.
Not only did the aftermath of World War II French cinema silence the existence of collaboration to favor the myth of Resistancialism but it also buried the memory of foreign forms of resistance such as the Manouchian group.
[16] The communists "probably lost only a few thousand men to German firing squads",[17] but the figure of 75 000 became an accepted truth and contributed to the legacy of the resistance remaining central to the Party's identity.
The central power invested time and energy to make the occupation look like a dark parenthesis, insisting on the idea that the Vichy regime did not represent France.
[20] When he returned to power as a result of the political crisis of 1958, de Gaulle reinforced the mythology of the Resistance, notably though the pantheonization ceremony of Jean Moulin.
[21] While both factions shared differences with each other, there was consensus between both on that “the Resistance had represented the real France and incarnated the true feelings of the French people throughout the Occupation”.
[23] While traditional conservatism and the far-right in France had been discredited due to its role in the Vichy government, many rehabilitated former collaborators challenged the prevailing Resistance narrative.
In 1971, The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophüls definitively brought to an end the patriotic myth of mass resistance by depicting a country which wallowed in the collaboration.
[citation needed] Time (magazine) wrote that the film punctured "the bourgeois myth—or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans".
[29] Jean Leguay, second in command in the French National Police during the Nazi Occupation of France had been one of the main instigator of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in which 13,152 Jews were arrested and sent into deportation, including 4 000 children.
Klaus Barbie was extradited from Bolivia in 1983 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for his role in the roundup of the Izieu Children and the murder of numerous resistants fighters, including Jean Moulin.
After serving as budget minister under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Maurice Papon was in 1998 convicted of crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of more than 1600 Jews during the occupation.
The 50th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv round up was commemorated in 1992 by François Mitterrand, but it was not until July 1995 that President Jacques Chirac formally recognized the responsibility of the state in the deportation of French Jews during the Second World War.
