| Chapter Intro: | Introduction |
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than celebrating the contribution of the true ‘Résistants’, it sought to minimise them by associating the abstraction of ‘Resistance’ with the French nation as a whole. De Gaulle hailed himself as the very personification of this Resistance, ‘le premier Résistant de la France’. As such, the reality of Vichy as a disunited force, rife with internal fractures and divisions, was replaced in the national memory by the contrived image of a harmonised Resistance which reconciled and unified Gaullists and Communists.
In the determinedly forward-looking context of the 1950s, Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard (1955) served as a raw exhortation to recognise and embrace rather than erase the truth and to fully acknowledge and name the atrocities of the past. Following a commission by the ‘Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale’, Resnais worked with the writer, poet, and Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol to produce this short, stylised film. Cayrol was a French poet, novelist and essayist. He had been deported to a concentration camp after participating in the Resistance, and this experience has shaped all of his artistic creation. The suffering that he underwent at Mauthausen inspired his best known volume of poems, Poèmes de la Nuit et du Brouillard, published in 1946. In 1955 he collaborated with the French film director Alain Resnais in the acclaimed Holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard. The latter was not broadcast on French television until after the socialists came to power in 1981. Its cinema presentation in 1971 was, however, a great success. It combines interviews with French, German and English witnesses with newsreel footage and propaganda films of the period. Its reception was determined by the debate over Gaullism in 1968. De Gaulle died in 1970 but Pompidou continued his régime. De Gaulle was rarely referred to in the film as the heroic leader of the Free French, for Marcel Ophüls wished that he be viewed as a man suffering a loss of power after