Claire Gorrara

French crime fiction and the Second World War: past crimes, present memories

This study explores France’s preoccupation with memories of the Second World War through an examination of popular culture and one of its more enduring forms, crime fiction. It examines what such popular narratives have to tell us about past and present perceptions of the war years in France and how they relate to post-war debates over memory, culture and national identity. Starting with narratives of the Resistance in the late 1940s and concluding with contemporary crime fiction for younger readers, Gorrara examines popular memories of the Second World War in dialogue with the changing social, cultural and political contexts of remembrance in post-war France. From memories of the persecution of Jews and French collaboration to the legacies of the concentration camps and the figure of the survivor-witness, all the crime novels discussed grapple with the challenges of what it means to live in the shadow of such a past for generations past, present and future.

Malheurs et ténèbres: narratives of social disorder in Léo Malet's 120, rue de la Gare

* I would like to thank the British Academy for funding two research visits to Paris in 1999 to undertake archival work at the Bibliothèque des littératures policières. Such work enabled me to read French romans noirs of the 1940s and other material on which this article is based. Address for correspondence: School of European Studies, Cardiff University, PO Box 908, Cardiff CF10 3YQ. e-mail: gorrara@cardiff.ac.uk Leo Malet’s 120, rue de la Gare represents a turning point in French detective fiction. Published in November 1943, Malet’s first foray into crime writing under his own name introduced an Occupation readership to the figure of Nestor Burma, a Parisian private eye and recently repatriated prisoner of war. Burma’s investigations into the past of an amnesiac fellow deportee in the winter of 1941 sends him criss-crossing a country divided along geographical lines the zone occupee and the zone nono and socioeconomic lines as the unbridled pursuit of wealth and influence leads to social disorder and breakdown. Burma, as the first-person narrator of a tale of theft, betrayal and double, even triple, identities, invited the wartime reader into an exoticized version of their own lived reality of travel restrictions, food shortages and an atmosphere of fear, tension and unspoken dangers. What was to make this novel a watershed in the history of French detective fiction was the model it set up for a specifically French roman noir. F6ted in the immediate post-war period as ’Ie seul et unique auteur franglais de romans noirs’,’ Malet created a noir universe which owed as much to a rich heritage of French literary traditions as to the hard-boiled crime writing of a novelist like Dashiell Hammett. Predating by two years the first hardboiled crime series in France, the S6rie noire, 120, rue de la Gare (1943) is the first French roman noir to be set in a recognizable and contemporary French reality. It draws on plot elements from Dashiell Hammett’s The

Forgotten Crimes?: Representing Jewish Experience of the Second World War in French Crime Fiction

This article explores the relationship between French crime fiction and memories of the Second World War. It focuses on the late 1950s and early 1960s and representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in the work of Léo Malet and Hubert Monteilhet. For whilst these early post-war years are commonly supposed to have been given over to the repression of troubling wartime memories, selected French crime fiction offers an intriguing set of counter-narratives with which to challenge such notions of French historical amnesia. By examining Léo Malets Du rébecca rue des Rosiers (1957) and Des kilomètres de linceuls (1955) and Hubert Monteilhets Le Retour des cendres (1961), this article will show how representations of Jewish persecution and deportation in these fictions activate complex patterns of disclosure, displacement and disavowal of French wartime guilt and complicity. In so doing, these popular novels provide rich material for speculating on broader configurations of French wartime memories at a time of apparent forgetting.

Not seeing Auschwitz: memory, generation and representations of the Holocaust in twenty-first century French comics

ABSTRACT We are reaching a point in history when the generation who experienced the Holocaust as survivors, witnesses or exiles will soon disappear. What happens to our relationship to such a momentous event in global history when our living connection with such a past is broken? To answer this question, this article will explore recent French representations of the Holocaust through the comic book. It will approach such representations from the perspective of the grandchildren of those who were affected by the Holocaust, perhaps the last generation to have personal ties to this wartime past. It will focus specifically on Jérémie Dres’s Nous n’irons pas voir Auschwitz (2011), translated as We Won’t Go and See Auschwitz. As a “third generation” narrative, Dres’s work is attentive to stories of Jewish exile and loss to be found on the margins of Holocaust histories. This perspective translates into an openness towards transnational histories of the Holocaust; a recognition of place as a substitute for living memory and an awareness of comics’ potential to innovate in the transmission of Holocaust memories. Ultimately, this article will argue that the contemporary comic book acts as a privileged vehicle of remembrance, indicative of the reordering of Holocaust representations in an age of cultural memory.

Black October: comics, memory and cultural representations of October 17, 1961

The brutal police repression of the demonstration of 17 October 1961 stands as a stark reminder of the violence of French colonialism. A continuing official reluctance to acknowledge these traumatic events has led individuals and groups to seek alternative routes for recognition. This article explores one of these alternative routes: the comic book, and specifically Octobre Noir, a collaboration between writer Didier Daeninckx and graphic artist Mako. By analyzing the reframing of 17 October 1961 within the comic form, this article argues that Octobre noir offers a site for interrogating the relationship between history and memory. This is achieved by exchanging a cultural narrative of police brutality and Algerian victimization for a narrative of legitimate protest and Algerian political agency. Octobre noir exemplifies the value of the comic book as a vector of memory able to represent the past in ways that enrich historical analysis and inter disciplinary debate.

Speaking from Wales: Building a Modern Languages Community in the Era of Brexit

This chapter suggests that in Wales there is considerable momentum to arrest and reverse the decline in language learning. Since 2014, the Welsh government, universities, schools, cultural institutes and third-sector organisations have been working in partnership to deliver initiatives at local, regional and national levels. These initiatives aim at increasing the uptake of modern languages and at inspiring young people in Wales to develop a more global mindset. The chapter outlines the current context for modern languages in Wales. It profiles a case study project that uses mentoring to promote modern languages study to secondary-school pupils. Assessing the likely impact of Brexit for modern languages policy and education, it concludes that there is impetus within the modern languages community in Wales to develop an integrated programme for modern languages, which begins in primary school and continues to university.

What the Liberator Saw: British War Photography, Picture Post and the Normandy Campaign

This article examines the photographs of British Army stills photographers who accompanied Allied infantry, tank, and airborne units on the Normandy campaign from June to September 1944. These photographs are rarely commented upon as aesthetic objects in their own right or interrogated as primary historical documents. This article aims to make visible this substantial body of work, held today in the Imperial War Museum, and to identify and analyse the multivalent narratives of the Normandy campaign such images represent. It will contend that such photographs and their captions are traversed by and constructed through British scripts of war that go beyond the photographs role as visually marking actual historical events. Such photographs helped shape interpretations of not only the prosecution of war in Normandy but also of France as an ambivalent wartime ally — both victor and victim of the Second World War. They were an important vector for the cultural construction (and rehabilitation) of France in the summer of 1944 and played a vital role in establishing the coordinates of Frances war story for British readers. By examining these and other front-line photographs published in the popular illustrated magazine Picture Post, this article will argue in favour of a contextual approach to British war photography and its representations of the Normandy campaign. It will analyse how, in this case, rather than representing the Norman population as the passive recipients of liberation, a view prevalent in Allied historical accounts of the period, Picture Post mobilized official British war photographs to depict the common humanity of French and British experiences of war. In so doing, Picture Posts visual narrative promoted the value of intercultural understanding and tolerance at a critical juncture in Anglo–French relations.

Book review: Margaret-Anne Hutton, French Crime Fiction 1945–2005: Investigating World War II

glimmer of an acknowledgement and grasp of their lowly social positioning, their exploitation, and the drudgery of their repetitive bouts of unbridled and painfully predictable hedonism. Yet, juxtaposed against this is a firm and unwavering commitment to continue blindly to ‘chase the dream’, consume and ‘get on it’. Briggs’s text reveals a cohort of young people whose hearts and minds have been captured and enslaved by capitalist consumer ideology. Overall, Briggs has produced a marvellous text. I couldn’t help but bring to my reading and review of the book a pinch of personal perspective and experience from my time in San Antonio. In academic terms, I felt there was the potential for Briggs to develop his gendered analysis of his findings further; particularly given the extensive data around sex, promiscuity and the objectification of women. As is the trend within patterns of offending and deviant behaviour more broadly (see Wykes and Welsh, 2009), the deviance and risk-taking of Briggs’s male respondents tended to be far more extreme and grotesque in nature than that of their female counterparts. A greater utilisation of masculinities theories would have helped here, I feel. These small quibbles aside, and returning to the ‘personal’ in this review, I find it incredibly hard to disagree with much of what Briggs says, as it very much mirrors my own experiences. Throughout I found myself repeatedly nodding my head in agreement. For me, he provides a highly accurate, nuanced description and analysis of what is going on in Europe’s party capital; and no doubt in countless other similar holiday resorts across Europe and possibly the globe. His fascinatingly rich and penetrative ethnography gets beneath the glossy sheen of ‘harmless fun in the sun’. Peeling back this façade, it reveals the brutal requirements and demands of day-to-day life for young people (at home and abroad) in advanced market societies. It exposes the sheer violence of capitalism in its most extreme incarnation – capitalismo extremo – as it continues to blindly chew up everything in its path, excreting its soulless, monotonous and ultimately unfulfilling spaces of liminal consumption at the other end. In its wake poorly resourced and under-developed public services, which tend to the various casualties, struggle to keep pace. Above all, this book represents an account of a truly critical ethnography that has values and a strong moral compass. It provides a refreshing and much needed tonic to the current liberal impasse of minimal intervention in capitalism’s worst, and downright unethical, extremes. I thoroughly recommend Deviance and Risk on Holiday.

Reframing War: Histories and Memories of the Second World War in the Photography of Julia Pirotte

This article examines the photographic narratives of the Second World War produced by Jewish Polish-Belgian émigré photographer Julia Pirotte and their post-war trajectory. It begins by proposing a set of critical frames which ground the analysis of Pirottes press photographs of the Liberation of Marseille in 1944. It explores the narratives of liberation and resistance transmitted in these photographs and demonstrates how these photographs were mobilised to build and promote a ‘national’ picture of French activism and unity at the wars end. The article then proceeds to examine the ‘afterlives’ of Pirottes photographs and the ways in which they have been successively reframed to tell different war stories. In particular, this article connects Pirottes photographs and their reproduction to fraught debates on the histories and legacies of the Resistance and argues that they have been used, on a number of occasions, to make visible the contribution of foreigners to the French Resistance. This is evidenced in the re-captioning of her photographs for various publication and exhibition projects since the 1990s. By interrogating how Pirottes photographic narratives of liberation and resistance have been re-presented for different post-war audiences, this article makes a case for photography as an influential cultural medium which continues to shape the contours of French war memory today.

Facing the Past: French Wartime Memories at the Millennium

More than almost any other aspect of French twentieth-century history, the resistance has symbolized a set of democratic and liberal values which constitute the bedrock of French post-war identity. Yet in the 1990s, this heroic story of a national uprising against the forces of nazism was challenged. The war record of prominent resistance activists, such as Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, came under increasing attack.1 Both in the courtroom and in the pages of major newspapers, the lives and actions of resistance heroes, dead and alive, were contested in ways that point to the very dissolution of the Gaullist myth of la France resistante. In this chapter, we shall explore the shifting politics of memory by looking at the impact of two wartime figures on current debates over the legacy of France’s wartime past: Jean Moulin, the iconic figure of Gaullist resistance, and Maurice Papon, the former Vichy civil servant who was successfully prosecuted for complicity in crimes against humanity in 1998.