Storying the archive of war

Unique among formerly occupied western countries, France set about creating an official archive of its Resistance activity immediately after the war was over. Creating such an archive was a process through which the collectors of the documents, ex-Resisters, were themselves transformed into witnesses, to become in effect the material of the archive. This approach of archive creation as lived history, spearheaded by the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, the predecessor (1951–1979) of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, would become the dominant post-war force in Resistance historiography for several decades – Laurent Douzou (2019) indeed argued that, ‘as late as the 1980s and 1990s nobody studied the French resistance without using these sources’ (p. 97). In this article, which will situate Margaret's seminal work, Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and narrative forms,1940–50 (Atack, 1989), within this contemporary historiography, I am interested in archives – firstly how an official archive of the French Resistance came to be created in the late 1940s and 1950s when there was no depositary of documents to draw on, secondly how oppositional archives like Margaret's were developed as a critique of the historical orthodoxy, and finally, the ways in which the digitised turn in archives may change some of our understanding of ourselves as researchers today.

The official archive of the French resistance

As Pieter Lagrou (2007: 21) pointed out, whilst in Belgium and the Netherlands the end of the War implied the re-establishment of the pre-war regimes which had continued as governments in exile during the German occupation, the French case was fundamentally different. The constitutional investiture of Pétain and the French State at Vichy meant that it was the opponents of that regime who now assumed power in France and were necessarily termed “Provisional” until the first post-war national elections of October 1945. In this situation and in order to pass over in silence the existence of Vichy and the Allies, General De Gaulle was forced to nationalise the contribution of the Resistance movements, hence his speech at the Hôtel de Ville on 25 August 1944 proclaiming that France had been liberated by its own people, ‘avec l’appui et le concours de la France tout entière, de la France qui se bat, de la seule France’ (1970: 439–440). In a sense, this assertion implied the existence of evidence of Resistance activity across the whole of the territory. The urgency of the search for proof was indicated by government decrees issued on 20 October 1944, less than two months after the liberation of Paris, and on 6 June 1945, immediately at the end of the war in Europe. The role of the two bodies set up which would eventually merge into the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (hereafter ‘Comité’) in 1950, ‘n’est pas d’élaborer une œuvre historique dont le moins qu’on puisse dire est qu’elle serait prématurée, mais d’en rassembler les éléments et d’en constituer les archives’ (quoted in Douzou, 2005: 55).

The clearly official nature of this process of archive creation was indicated by the fact that the organisations concerned were attached to the President's and subsequently the Prime Minister's offices, with eleven government ministries initially represented. Given that the archive was expected to give voice to ex-Resisters, the personnel involved in archive collection needed to demonstrate their authentic Resistance credentials, a key test for the participation of historians at a time when 140 of the 1500 teachers in higher education in France were living through an ‘épuration universitaire’ (Rouquet, 2010: 137). As well as well-known professional historians like Fernand Braudel and Alfred Sauvy, and the doyen of the Comité, Henri Michel, an agrégé d’histoire active in the student resistance in Lyon, people who were not trained as historians but who had been key leaders of the Resistance – General Cochet, Daniel Mayer, Francis-Louis Closon – played an important part in the Comité's work from the very beginning. When the Comité established a network of over sixty departmental correspondents charged with tracing the development of the Resistance in their regions and interviewing participants, Henri Michel's 1949 profile of suitable candidates stressed the primordial importance of their having been members of the Resistance (p. 49).

For its archive, the Comité gathered written documents – clandestine newspapers and tracts as well as papers donated by ex-Resisters, sometimes personal papers from major Resistance actors like Rol Tanguy, the Communist FTP (Francs-tireurs et partisans) leader, or Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, leader of Libération-Sud, or papers relating to specific groups, like the Réseau du Souvenir or the collection of les Amicales des Réseaux Renseignements et Evasion de la France Combattante. The Comité rapidly, however, took the view that documents alone would not provide a full picture of the realities of clandestine life, and that this could only be appreciated through the témoignages of participants, hence the network of departmental correspondents who, by 1949, had already amassed around 1500 testimonies. There was a sense here that the clock was ticking as memories faded or potential interviewees passed away. The very nature of underground activity with people identified by codewords and aliases known only to a few comrades made the task even more difficult, as did the growing tensions of the Cold War which introduced highly political conflicts into what might formerly have been seen as an area of potential national union.

The guiding principle of the archival effort was that Resistance equated to action and that the proof of this activity lay in the accumulation of separate Resistance actions across the whole of France, hence Henri Michel's (1949) faith in local departmental correspondents; ‘seuls des indigènes, de naissance, ou d’adoption, connaissant bien leur pays, capables d’inspirer confiance à leurs compatriotes et connus d’eux, pouvaient sur place, analyser la naissance et l’évolution de l’action résistante’ (p. 50). The Paris office of the Comité in the 8th arrondissement became the vast depository of this growing archive. I remember my own visits there in the late 1970s. In the middle of the room was a massive card file index of Resistance actions and personalities, organised by movement and classified alphabetically and by department. On the walls were beautifully coloured maps of each department, pinpointing what Resistance activity had occurred in every locality. There were cupboards full of roneoed transcripts of interviews with Resisters across France, over 2000 I think by the time I was working there. Physically, the picture presented by the archive was that Resistance meant Resistance action, what was done, and that this Resistance had been ubiquitous across France, involving multiple organisations and movements. Indeed, Henri Michel helpfully produced a 10-page gloss of all the groups as a crib, with explanations as to what the abbreviations of all the different movements stood for (Sainclivier and Veillon, 2010: 54). In 1982, Henry Rousso (1982) recalled the famous fiches of the Comité and their influence on Resistance history: ‘recensant tous les faits de résistance, leur date, leur lieu, leurs auteurs; un travail considérable qui montre l’intérêt de situer dans le temps, avec beaucoup de précision, toute analyse du phénomène de la Résistance’ (p. 104).

As an academic output from this burgeoning archive, the Comité soon began to operate as a research hub on the Resistance, with thematic commissions established to investigate particular subjects such as internees and the deported, often led by former Resisters like the socialist Daniel Mayer. In 1950, the Comité created its own journal, the Revue d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, which rapidly became the cornerstone of Resistance research. The journal's founding editorial team demonstrated the Comité's continuing balancing act between the presence of well-known Resisters, such as Georges Bidault, president of the CNR (Conseil National de la Résistance), alongside that of civil servants from the National Archives, people who would be known to the present government. In line with the mission of giving voice to ex-Resisters, the first issue, November 1950, contained Georges Bidault's 1946 address in Béziers in homage to Jean Moulin. The earliest issues of the Revue presented the phenomenon of resistance in largely military and international terms, although this was followed from April 1958 onwards by articles specifically treating the French experience. As Jacqueline Sainclivier and Dominique Veillon (2010: 63) argued, the tendency in much of the Comité's work was to present the facts on the basis of the widest available range of sources but without necessarily any developed attempt to problematise the material.

The Comité also sponsored an edition of books, L’Esprit de la Résistance, published by PUF (Presses universitaires de France), on particular Resistance groups like Combat, on the political and social ideas of the Resistance, and on Resistance thought. Seventeen books were published between 1954 and 1968, at a rate of one or two per year. A subsequent collection on the Liberation brought out by Hachette covered the liberation of each region in France, with 15 titles published between 1973 and 1975. These descriptions of the events of 1944, seen at a micro-level, provided a vital comparative picture of liberation in France, emphasising how the disposition of German troops still remaining in an area, the local strength and unity/disunity of Resistance forces, and the attitude of Allied Civil Affairs officers conditioned very different experiences of liberation on the ground. Importantly, the series was largely authored by Resisters who had themselves played a key role in the events. Thus the book on the Limousin was written by Georges Guingouin (1974) who had carried out several operations against the Germans and was in command of one of the largest groups of armed maquisards. It was Guingouin himself who received the German surrender in Limoges. Pierre Bertaux, author of the volume on Toulouse (1973), had spent 2 years in prison before being named as Commissaire de la République for the area as a replacement for the severely injured Jean Cassou. In this role he took over administration in the region and would subsequently welcome de Gaulle to the newly liberated city on 16 September 1944.

It was evident that the authority of these writers derived principally from their personal Resistance experiences. They were empowered to speak about the events because they had resisted, they had been there, participating in the fight to regain power in France. As individuals they were necessarily a part of the Resistance archive. The Resistance status of those attached to the Comité made it problematic to criticise or interrogate their accounts. I remember in the early 1980s having an opportunity to interview some key Resisters and being overawed, not only by the quite obvious courage they had displayed in the War – these were heroes – but also by the impossibility, the unthinkability of questioning them in any way. As Douzou (2019) suggested:

Another very particular influence on resistance historiography has been the axiom that only those who participated in the movement are suitably qualified to write about it: unlike other heroic moments of twentieth – century history, the resistance was a clandestine and elusive adventure intimately known only by its members. For at least thirty years the result of this axiom was that historians of the Resistance tended to be former resisters…This superposition – one might even say confusion - of actors and historians lasted a considerable length of time (pp. 97, 98).

The Resistance archive collected so soon after the War, and the publications which emanated from it, created an enormously influential Resistance orthodoxy in which Resistance was equated with action and activity, and in which the voices of Resisters themselves were those accorded particular credibility and respect. Sainclivier and Veillon (2010), reviewing the Comité's output over these years, detected certain gaps in the overall coverage – there was very little on communist resistance, nothing on the Jewish resistance, and nothing at all on women (p. 63). Many of these lacunae could be accounted for by the composition of the Comité's leading personnel in political, religious, and gender terms. In addition, the Comité's definition of Resistance as combatant, as quasi military in character, inevitably meant that women were barely present, either as actors or as subjects. As actors, the majority of the famous Resisters were men, and the women who appeared within the confines of this historiography were by definition exceptional – Lucie Aubrac, Berty Albrecht for example – women whose exploits certainly merited due attention, but who were clearly not considered as the norm. To read the output of the journal and that of the published Esprit and Libération series is to be in a largely woman-free zone. As subjects too, women were regarded, if I correctly recall the contents of the Comité's massive card file, as one of a subset of categories of the population: agriculteurs, instituteurs, fonctionnaires, and femmes. This was of course before Paula Schwartz's seminal article in 1987 on redefining Resistance (1987) which called for an understanding that as men went to fight with Resistance movements or the maquis, it was women who were left behind, visibly exposed as the ground floor of the French underground.

An oppositional archive of the Resistance

Meanwhile Margaret, working away during the 1970s and 1980s on the doctoral research which would produce her seminal book, described herself at this time as floundering, ‘I floundered for years. I had no idea how to shape a study of Resistance fiction that would do something other than read through the words to identify themes reflecting their times’ (Atack, 2018: 117). In the dominant historiography, written texts, either fiction or the press were seen as mere adjuncts of historical reflection. Whilst the Comité's Esprit series included works which brought together articles from clandestine newspapers, for example Les Idées politiques et sociales de la Résistance (Michel and Mirkine-Guetzévitch, 1954), and argued that Resistance had to be seen in this case as more than armed fighting, the clandestine press was framed as largely of interest for what it could tell the reader about how Resisters prepared ideologically for a new Republic, a specific focus to add further information about Resistance and liberation activity. Creative writers were seen, with publishers, as another category of the population rather than as being centrally involved in Resistance in the way that the movements and réseaux were. This attitude which downgraded the written word, and in particular fiction, was common in much of 1970s/1980s Resistance historical scholarship. MRD Foot, the official historian of, and incidentally participant in, SOE (Special Operations Executive) outlined in 1976 the tasks which he regarded as central to real Resistance – intelligence, escape and subversion. Writing in comparison with these had a relatively low salience: ‘Those who worked in the clandestine press, and survived, have made sure that we hear plenty of it. There were great names among them…and what they did was worth doing: as dangerous, as complicated and as secret as any other resistance work, and some of it quite influential’ (Foot, 1976: 215). In the early 1980s, a colleague and I were awarded a small grant by the Nuffield Foundation to set up what we called a teaching archive on the French Resistance for British university students. In awarding the grant, the Nuffield trustees pointed out to us that they had doubts about the educational value of the literary sources we were proposing. They argued that the quality of these was not likely to be particularly high and suggested instead that the acquisition of what they termed ‘historical material’ might deserve a greater share of the effort.

Challenging this overall academic consensus in which contemporary analyses of the literature of Resistance valued historical rather than literary considerations meant questioning the terms in which the whole debate was being framed : ‘To assess the contribution of the Resistance to the war effort in primarily military terms entails a fundamental misrecognition of the value to be accorded to the ideological and discursive at this time; it is difficult to see how, without public expression, there could have been a Resistance’ (Atack, 1989: 4). Rather than seeing Resistance solely as action, as deeds, Margaret argued for an acceptance that words did not just reflect historical action but were themselves a vital part of the archive of war – they were as much Resistance as the activities portrayed in the coloured departmental maps of the Comité: ‘To read the fiction or indeed the tracts and newspapers, as documents reacting to or reflecting the events is to pose the question in false terms and really to miss the point. These words are not reflecting the struggle, they are deliberately and overtly part of it’ (Atack, 1989: p. 23).

Margaret's oppositional archive of fiction of the War disputed the overwhelming historiographical respect accorded at that time to the expertise and importance of Resisters themselves. The criterion for inclusion in her archive was not the Resistance career of the author, but rather the theme of the fiction itself, in particular whether it represented the war as essential to the generation and resolution of the major conflicts in the particular book. The personal experience of the author and the fiction's relationship with so-called historical truth was beside the point. She refused to accept ‘the ultimate dominance of the historical in the evaluation of the place and value of this writing’ (Atack, 1989: 6). Importantly, Margaret's 1989 work disputed the very time-frame of the traditional historical orthodoxy. Her study brought together texts published during the war period by Vercors, Louis Aragon, André Chamson, and Elsa Triolet – together with writing appearing after 1944 – Marcel Aymé, Albert Camus, Jean-Louis Curtis, and Roger Nimier.

History as the primary interpretive framework was displaced by a close analysis of the texts themselves: ‘What emerges from studying the novels of the Occupation and post-Liberation years is the fact that none of this fiction can be considered to be unproblematically faithful to the event’ (Atack, 1989: 235).

Margaret's archive for her 1989 book would be crucially supplemented and enlarged through her 2006 Arts and Humanities Research Council project (FRAME) on French war narratives since 1939 in which she and colleagues sought to bring together details of all the novels produced about this period. Their data base included over 1950 texts which for the first time provided information about works which had largely slipped out of public and critical view, a potentially rich resource through which to explore French and Francophone representations of the complex war period. The project stood at one remove from both the Comité's historical orthodoxy, and from the later waves of reinterpretation on collaboration and the Holocaust. Through this extended archive she sought to widen the range of texts for critical consideration and importantly give voice to ‘Other Stories/Stories of Otherness’, thus far absent in our understanding of the war years in France (Atack, 2011: 185).

The archive which Margaret had first established in opposition to that of the Comité and her approach to it in the 1989 book helped to precipitate a new cultural approach to war in France, one no longer located in historical studies. In a 2011 volume on French Studies in and for the twenty-first century, the book resulting from Margaret's research was described as a ‘milestone’ in the development of war and culture studies in the United Kingdom (Cooper et al., 2011: 224). It made it possible to envisage studies of war by scholars who were not primarily historians, to examine the cultural and social implications of war and, in so doing, to engage productively with the key insights of French philosophers and cultural commentators. The Group for War and Culture Studies, established at the University of Westminster in 1995, was emblematic of this influence. Importantly, the Group was formed within a French department where French and francophone literary, linguistic and cultural studies were the intellectual seedbed, rather than within a history department. With its interdisciplinary approach, and its emphasis on the importance of representation, memory and identity, the Group would help to open up a field in war studies which was new and revolutionary, but which was in itself then ripe for development. The initial response to the Group exceeded all expectation, with some 200 scholars from 14 countries around the world expressing interest. The conferences, seminars and publications of the Group – France at War in the Twentieth Century: propaganda, myth and metaphor (Holman and Kelly, 2000), Remembering and representing the experience of war in twentieth century France: committing to memory (Kelly, 2000) – were evidence of this cultural turn in studies of the war in France which was extended in the foundation of a new journal, Journal of War and Culture Studies in 2007. It was unsurprising that Margaret was a contributor to the first issue with an article on ‘Sins, Crimes, guilty passions in France's stories of war and occupation’ (Atack, 2007). The latest issues of the Journal demonstrate both how wide its range of interests has become in geographical terms – articles on the Iran–Iraq war, Northern Ireland, American intervention in Afghanistan – but how closely it continues to mirror the parameters which Margaret pioneered, exploring relationships between war and culture in the modern and contemporary era.

The digitised turn in archives

In the post-war period through to the 1970s and 1980s, these two ‘archives in process’ (Steedman, 2001: 5), defined Resistance in very different ways. The official archive depicted a Resistance of action, sited ex-Resisters as the authentic experts, and adopted historical analysis as the chosen interpretive optic. Margaret's oppositional archive focused on words and fiction, challenging the temporal frame of the Comité by including works published well after the end of the War. Since the 1980s and 1990s, however, our working methods as researchers and thus our encounters with Resistance archives have radically changed. The digitalisation of archives in the early twenty-first century has opened up a potentially much greater range of sources online and helped us to locate documents which we might not otherwise have known about. The Gallica site of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for example will let us read clandestine newspapers – Combat, Libération, Témoignage Chrétien – from the comfort of our offices. The website of the Musée de la Résistance Nationale at Champigny-sur-Marne carries key Resistance documents, whilst many regional archives have digitised parts of their Resistance collections which were previously difficult to access. The Val de Marne for example hosts online interviews with ex-Resisters.

But this digitised turn also perhaps encourages us to reflect anew on our relationship with archives and our own positionality in using them. Maryanne Dever (2013) pointed to what she called ‘material literacy’ (p. 177), what is gained by actually touching documents and reading them in situ. Researchers on the Resistance in the seventies and eighties certainly spoke of a tactile relationship with their sources. Douzou described spending weeks in 1984 trawling through documents created by the Comité: ‘Since it was forbidden to photocopy them, I spent entire days copying out these accounts by hand like a monastic scribe’ (Atack, 2018: 49). Margaret similarly remembered discovering Les Lettres Françaises in the Brotherton Library in Leeds: ‘there it was: Les Lettres Françaises clandestines, facsimile edition, housed in the Special Collections section. Because it was deemed to fall within the 50 year copyright regulations, only one article per issue could be photocopied. So I copied out all 19 issues by hand’ (Atack, 2018: 118, 119).

Dever's assumption is that there may be things to learn from documents and archives quite separate from the content of the papers themselves. The physical layout of the Comité's collection in the 1970s for example translated visually its view of Resistance as a vast accumulation of individual acts, caught for posterity as fiches in a card file. In addition, a document could be read quite differently in either its digitalised or material form. The architect Susan Yee described her research encounters in the Le Corbusier archive in Paris, and her reaction when the archivist proudly told her that they were digitalising the archive: ‘if I had accessed this drawing from home, I would never have known that it was stored separately, carefully rolled, that it was dirty with smudges and fingerprints…looking at the curator's scans made me think respectfully about mass consumption, about allowing everyone to have access, about the technical problems of how to use a cursor to move around the drawing on the screen, and about how differently I understood the digital image and the designer behind it’ (quoted in Broch et al., 2023: 346).

The danger for researchers working with digitised archives is that we can be engaged in what Lara Putnam (2016: 392) described as ‘disintermediated’ activity where cultural context, and an appreciation of how and why the archive was collected in the first place, are absent. Algorithms will do the fetching for us so that bricks and mortar, regional expertise or immersive reading are less necessary. Without physical travelling, we may find ourselves at one experiential remove from the situation which produced the document and occasioned its collection in the archive in the first place: ‘Things happen in archives and libraries and on the way to them’ (Putnam, 2016: 395). By staking much on accessibility we have of course remade the information landscape for researchers. However, in doing this, the link between information and location, the place that that information is about, may become much weaker. The materiality of an archive relates to its geographical location and proximal cultural environment, and these also frame our encounters as researchers. Douglas Johnson (1969), reviewing one of Richard Cobb's books, noted Cobb's comparison between two investigative trades – that of historian, and that of detective: ‘the historian arriving in the small French provincial town, looking round the cafés before proceeding to the archives’, and ‘Maigret putting his nose in the wind and getting the feel of the place’ (pp. 223–224).

I may be exhibiting here a sort of romance, a nostalgia of the archives, even perhaps a self-aggrandisement of the researcher, but our complex experiences, I would argue, are themselves part of our own story of the archives – the historian Douzou, like a monk, writing his perilous history of the Resistance, and Margaret chancing upon Les Lettres Françaises, and slowly copying out each issue. For Carolyn Steedman (2001), the footnotes we provide as historians in our articles and books are really markers of our personal archival journeys, the ‘having been there (the train to the distant city, the call number, the bundle opened, the dust)’ (p. 145). In this sense, as she says, we are storying the archive ourselves, and our grammatical tense is not, ‘the future perfect, not the conventional past historic of English-speaking historians, not even the présent historique of the French, but the syntax of the fairy tale…once upon a time’ (Steedman, 2001: 150).