User:Masaguira/sandbox

Context
The challenge for the French government in the aftermath of World War II was enormous. The Liberation of France immediately creates an atmosphere of confidence and hope in the future. La Resistance becomes associated to renewal. However, this positive and unitary attitude does not last. Soon, French people would call for tougher measures against women and men suspected of collaboration. In addition the legal purge ("épuration légale") conducted by the French government from 1944 to 1949, France underwent a wave of public executions and humiliations known as the "épuration sauvage" These purges included the head shaving of women who had had relationship with the German enemy.

In this period of complete disorder and confusion, different voices from what had been "La Résistance" could be heard; the two main voices being the Gaullist and the Communist (also self-proclaimed as le « parti des 75 000 fusillés »). Hence the need for France to come up with a dominant unifying narrative that will later be referred to as "the myth resistancialist" or as "resistancialism". This narrative presented the Vichy Regime as a "parenthesis" in French history which did not question "the righteousness of the French nation".

The myth is often embodied by De Gaulle's Paris Liberated speech, delivered at Paris City Hall on the 25th of August 1944, after the Liberation of Paris. "Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!"

The infringement in popular culture
This national narrative progressively came to shape popular culture. Cinema has been considered a useful tool both to create the myth in the aftermath of the war and to question it after 1968.

The Battle of the Rails (La Bataille du rail) is a war movie by René Clément in 1946 llustrating the French Resistance among railway workers which consisted in sabotaging German trains network.

This movie is one of the most famous French Résistance movie and greatly contributed to Resistancialism.

A few years later, René Clément directed the historical film "Is Paris Burning" (1966) based on a book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. This movie depicts the liberation of Paris staged by the French Resistance and the Free French forces.

In 1956, the French documentary "Night and Fog" (Nuit et Brouillard" by Alain Resnais is censured because it depicted a French officer guarding a deportation camps.

It is only in 1969 that French cinema presents the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany with Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié).

Not only did the French cinema post WWII silenced the existence of collaboration to favour the myth of Resistancialism but it also burried the memory of foreign forms of resistance such as the Manouchian group.