| The portrayal of France under the German occupation has undergone many conceptual shifts over the past fifty years. Early narratives about the French experience during the Second World War revolved around a clearly defined, and elaborately constructed, set of premises which suggested in no uncertain terms that the political right was responsible for the creation of the collaborative Vichy government and that members of the political left were valiantly fighting to re-establish basic freedoms, to restore human rights, and to rid the country of the occupying forces. This dissertation examines these postwar myths and suggests a more complex reading of participation in the Resistance, with particular emphasis on the role of the extreme-right in various resistance organisations. While most scholars have suggested that the Resistance was a product of republican values, emphasizing the commitment to human rights and equality, I argue that there was a significant part of the Resistance movements that was not born of those traditions and whose motivations for resistance were not necessarily wedded to any democratic heritage.;Many men and women unabashedly used their previous participation in groups of the extreme right to explain their decision to engage in the Resistance. Though this decision was not always made easily, as many of these people were ideologically close to both the Vichy government and occasionally to the Nazis, there was no real contradiction in their minds between their prewar political engagements and their wartime resistance activity. Yet, after the war was over, these rightists were left out of the Resistance tale, as the three founding premises of resistance memory were created: that the Resistance was apolitical, united, and Gaullist. As some scholars have pointed out, these premises were respectively presupposed, dreamed, and invented. Along those lines, I argue that many rightist resisters demonstrated a great deal of continuity in thought and action from the prewar years and that their actions were certainly political, often divisive, and almost never initially Gaullist, though many of them did come to cooperate with de Gaulle in the later years of the war. |
