I saw a film last night which was a story about some people involved in the French Resistance during WW2. It was a French film with English subtitles. I can’t remember the name of the film, but it was a fairly recent one.
I was brought up to admire the French Resistance and other such organisations in other countries. I was brought up to think of them, and the spies sent out from the UK, and other places, to assist them, as heroes and heroines.
The most immediate impression I got from the film, one which I am sure was not intended by the film’s director, was that the resistance fighters were lads being irresponsible, as lads will be, and having a whale of a time playing with bombs and guns and stuff they could never have played with in peace time.
The film showed some older men trying to marshal the lads into some sort of organised army, and trying to get them to direct their attacks against chosen targets, but, of course, being lads, they resisted any sort of control. Only when threatened with the stoppage of their supplies of arms and armaments did they begin to give way and learn to behave like soldiers.
For every death of a German, or act of violence, by the resistance there were, of course, reprisals by the Germans. One cannot help wondering if the resistance did not cause more French deaths than German deaths, and more trouble to the French than to the Germans.
These lads seemed to be totally unconcerned by, indeed oblivious to, the danger into which they were putting everyone around them. If they came under suspicion it was their friends and family that the Gestapo would go for.
In fact, their activities created an atmosphere of danger, fearfulness, mistrust and suspicion for everyone in France. Because of their activities every French person lived in terror of the Gestapo. Because of their activities the Germans tightened their grip on France.
The Gestapo have, of course, a dreadful reputation for torture and the like, and the film played on that. I wonder what the truth is. I mean, lets take it from where the Germans have ’conquered’ France, and, lets face it, going around conquering their neighbours, not to mention countries on the other side of the world, has long been a favourite pastime of the European nations!!! So, the Germans are now in control in France, it is part of the German Empire, and they are faced with the problem of governing the country. Their biggest problem is that they have hordes of lads rampaging about with guns and bombs which are being supplied to them form a foreign power. What would you do to bring the lads under control, to stop them from going around killing people and generally disrupting everything and causing mayhem?
Lads on the rampage are not easy to control. In fact, they are well nigh impossible to control. It seems to me that if the Gestapo were not torturers before they encountered the French Resistance, then they were driven to it BY the French Resistance.
Then there is the issue of whether they actually did achieve anything. I rather doubt it. As I said above, in response to such attacks the Germans would only have poured more troops into the country and tightened their grip on it. There are other means of dealing with such a situation, having your country invaded, than going on the rampage, but that is another issue.
All in all, my current thinking has had me totally reverse my attitude towards the French Resistance: I no longer see heroes; I see bad lads who went on the rampage and caused untold harm.