Mythmaking, martyrdom, and massacres
Commemorative plaque in Oradour-sur-Glane (Translation: Here lies a place of supplice, where a groupe of men was massacred and burnt by Nazis. Please reflect)
June 10, 1944. Jean-Marcel Darthout is 20, recently married, and lives in Oradour-sur-Glane, a small village near Limoges. Like many rural folk living in occupied France, Jean-Marcel and his friends experience the war passively. He recalls their principal concern earlier that day: finding a replacement goalkeeper for their football match the next day. That is before SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ rolled in just after midday. SS soldiers rounded up Oradour’s citizens: the men spread in small groups across the town to be shot, whilst the women and children were crammed into the church, which was then set alight. Of the 649 present in Oradour-sur-Glane that day, only 7 survived, including Darthout. The justification for the massacre? Reprisal for nearby resistance activity.
August 2010. Aged 11, I step out of the family car, dragging my feet as I am marched towards Oradour-sur-Glane’s Centre de la Mémoire, wondering how a rusty edifice beside a crumbled village could possibly warrant the interruption of precious pool time. The sights that followed would soon dispel such trivial qualms, the relics of Nazi brutality corrupting my puerile understanding of the world. But something else was instilled in me that day. A perennial, more sinister form of naivety supplanting its weaker, youthful precursor. For years, the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, alongside the Holocaust, would occupy the premier position in my taxonomy of human atrocity. It was an act of pure evil, perpetrated by pure evil, which itself could only be signified by sleek grey uniforms and swastika armbands. In other words, I subconsciously adopted the Nazi regime as A standardised measure of immorality, whilst simultaneously acknowledging 20th century Western moral supremacy – in accordance with the bold lines of French institutional knowledge.
A ”village martyre”, Oradour-sur-Glane did not obtain its status organically. Upon the insistence of then-provisional president Charles de Gaulle in 1946, the ruins were left intact. His aim was anchored in mythmaking: by materialising French martyrdom through Oradour, he sought to reinforce collective memory of an unflinching, resistant France in the face of Nazi barbarism, whilst the collaborationist reality - that 5-10% of the population aided the occupier - fell to pragmatic amnesia.
There is of course an argument to legitimise De Gaulle’s mediation of Oradour-sur-Glane and other tragedies. Following the occupation, major internal fissures amongst the civil population threatened the revival of the Republic. Discursive construction of a united France through shared suffering thus emerged as a reasonable remedy to prevent further fracture.
Far more problematic is the reduction of Nazi atrocities to mere demagogic devices, their lessons hammered into citizens but ignored by governments.Neo-imperialist allied foreign policy of the post-war 20th century often reprised the “Good vs Bad” binaries of the 1940s, recasting ‘communism’ in the latter role. Consider the First Indochina War.
Weeks after the final eviction of Japanese occupiers from then-Indochina (now Vietnam), France’s bid to re-establish its colonial authority, but was met with vehement independentist opposition: Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. What ensued was a brutal seven-year war. Farcically, the official state justification for the conflict was the curbing of communism; behind closed doors, De Gaulle threatened to turn to the USSR should Truman deny him US support.
It was during this colonial enterprise that the cursed formula of Oradour-sur-Glane was reprised, this time with France as the perpetrator. On November 29th, 1947, French troops stormed the rural village of My Trach in a hunt for Viet Minh troops, but only elderly people, women and children. Those who remained were either burned alive in their houses, or rounded up, taken under a nearby bridge, and executed by machine gun. Over 300 villagers were killed, including 170 women (many of whom were raped before their execution) and 157 children.
The blueprints for each massacre were identical: occupying military forces butcher a village of civilians as collective punishment for local resistance activity. As such, why is one a lieu-de-mémoire (see Pierre Nora) visited by over 300,000 tourists a year, whilst the other is condemned to the oubliettes of 20th century history? Perhaps because one was perpetrated by Western collective memory’s great bogeymen, whilst the other was a precocious instance of “collateral damage” in the fight against communism. Because one was pragmatically mythologised by De Gaulle, whilst the other was an odious outcome of his colonial rapacity. Because one happened to France, whilst the other was at her hand.
My Trach memorial
The memorial scorn of My Trach is hardly an isolated occurrence. It is one of many forgotten instances of French war crimes committed during mid-20th century colonial conflicts continuously. To think concentrically, commemoration of events like My Trach could trigger a wider examination of French imperial abuses, something that recent governments refuse to undertake. Instead, any trace of colonial liability is expunged from curriculums in shrewd protection of Gaullist moral supremacy.
The juxtaposition of Oradour-sur-Glane and My Trach mounts a postmodern challenge of 20th century allied narratives. It is no invitation to qualify the greater tragedy - a futile and tactless exercise – but rather an acknowledgement of both as major consequences of neo-imperialist violence. Given how far we are from forgetting Nazi atrocities, we French should be ready to confront our own sordid past, in the hopes that we might spare future generations the exceptionalist indoctrination that we were subjected to.
