From late 1940 through mid-1942 Marcel Pagnol accommodated to varying degrees the demands of the Vichy regime and the German occupiers in order to ensure the survival of his film production business. In so doing, he placed himself in the ambiguous grey zone of thought and action that stretched between the poles of proactive collaboration and proactive resistance. Pagnol's wartime activities, especially the history of his film La Fille du puisatier (The Well-Digger's Daughter, 1940), offer insight into how material interest, ideology, and necessity shaped French industrialists' reactions to the Occupation. Pagnol's itinerary also reveals the compromise and conflict that often lay below the surface of Franco-German politics, while highlighting the importance that both regimes attached to cinema as a tool of economics, cultural policy, and propaganda.
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Accommodating Vichy
The Politics of Marcel Pagnol's La Fille du puisatier
Brett Bowles
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 84–107 (24 total)
Different Oppressions: A Feminist Exploration of Anti-Semite and Jew
Linda A. Bell
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew was published shortly after the end of the Nazi occupation of France. Written in France, by a Frenchman, it is about French anti-Semites and French Jews. While this may seem to restrict the application of what Sartre has to say, I felt from my first encounter with the book that his observations and analyses have enormous potential in helping us to understand sexism and even heterosexism as well as racism, including possibly different forms of anti-Semitism.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 1997
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (20 total)
Political and Narrative Ambiguities in La Bataille du Rail
Silvie Lindeperg
Unanimously celebrated as an authentic representation of French railroad workers' resistance against the Germans during the Occupation, René Clément's La Bataille du rail (The Battle of the Rails, 1945) was a valuable piece of ideological capital in the wake of France's liberation. Through a close reading of the film's production and reception, this article shows that the film's heroic blueprinting of the Resistance was the result of mediation between two opposing points of view: that of the Marxist Left, which sought to portray the Resistance as belonging to the working class, and that of the Gaullists, who were intent on promoting the myth of an idealized "True France" without class or ideological divisions and united in its opposition to the Germans.
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 142–162 (21 total)
The End as Present in the Means in Sartre's Morality and History: Birth and Re-inventions of an Existential Moral Standard
Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone
The question whether, in the interim, the "socialist morality" allows adequate restraint on revolutionary action, cannot fairly be answered in abstraction from history, in this case our epoch. We submit that the group of projects called corporate "globalization" - imposing free trade, privatization, and dominance of transnational corporations - shapes that epoch. These projects are associated with polarization of wealth, deepening poverty, and an alarming new global U.S. military domination. Using 9/11 as pretext for a "war on terror," this domination backs corporate globalization. If Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria made Sartre and Beauvoir assign moral primacy to overcoming oppressive systems, then U.S. global occupation should occasion rebirth of that commitment. Parallels among the three occupations are striking. France's turning of colonial and metropolitan working classes against each other is echoed by globalization's pitting of (e.g.) Chinese against Mexican workers in a race to lower wages to get investment. Seducing first-world workers with racial superiority and cheap imports from near-slavery producers once again conceals their thralldom to their own bosses. Nazi and French use of overwhelming force and even torture are re-cycled by the U.S. and its agents, again to hide the vulnerability of their small forces amidst their enemies.
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–27 (27 total)
The Origins of the Stanley Hoffmann We Knew
Some Comparisons on his Vichy Years with My Family Story
Peter Gourevitch
the dangers posed both by the Nazi Occupation of France and by the Soviet seizure of Lithuania, which together have placed in jeopardy the lives of a great number of men and women prominent in the democratic and labor movements in Europe…. [U
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–20 (20 total)
Love and Sex in Wartime
Controlling Women’s Sexuality in the Ukrainian Nationalist Underground
Marta Havryshko
expectations of gender, ideas about sexuality, national identity, and racial ideology. In particular, the punishment of women for “horizontal collaboration” during the Nazi occupation of France, Norway, Belgium, and Denmark has been widely researched. In