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Abstract
Thousands of young men and women left the French Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guyana) to join the Free French from 1941 to 1944. The contributions made by these Dissidents (Antillean Resistance fighters) has for decades been overlooked both at home and in metropolitan France. This article explores what Euzhan Palcy’s 2006 documentary, Parcours de Dissidents (The Journey of the Dissidents), reveals about how such historical omissions shape questions of national identity and belonging in the Antilles, through an analysis of its use of testimonies, archival footage and personal mementos. It also examines the film’s afterlife: how it has been used as a tool to demand greater recognition for these veterans and ultimately acts as an important site of commemoration, when physical memorials are still lacking.
Résumé
De milliers de jeunes hommes et femmes ont quitté les Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe et Guyane) pour rejoindre les Forces Françaises Libres entre 1941 et 1944. Le rôle joué par ces Dissidents (résistants des Antilles) a été oublié aussi bien aux Antilles qu’en métropole. Cet article examine ce que le documentaire d’Euzhan Palcy, Parcours de Dissidents (2006) peut nous révéler sur la façon dont cet oubli a pu influencer la question de l’appartenance des Antilles à la nation française. Nous considérons comment la réalisatrice utilise témoignages, images d’archive et photographies personnelles dans ce documentaire. Par ailleurs, l’article se penche également sur la trajectoire du film après sa première diffusion publique : il montre le poids du film dans la demande auprès de l’Etat français que soit reconnu le rôle joué par ces anciens combattants antillais pendant la guerre. Plus largement, l’article offre une réflexion sur l’approche des représentations cinématographiques en tant que ‘lieux de mémoire’.
Notes
1. See Lindeperg, Les écrans de l’ombre; Dominé, “Les représentations successives de la Résistance;” Hewitt, Remembering the Occupation in French Film.
2. For the annual celebrations to mark France’s National Day (14 July), there is a military parade in central Paris. The 8 May is a bank holiday in France which commemorates the end of the Second World War. The CHRD is an education programme run by the French Ministry for Education, to encourage school pupils to engage with the history of the Resistance and the Holocaust. Teachers in the Antilles have been forced to adapt the topics of the CHRD in order to discuss La Dissidence with their pupils. One example of this is a project undertaken by school children in Saint-Pierre, Martinique in 2005/6, where they studied this topic, under the general heading of ‘Resistance and Rural Life’. http://cms.ac-martinique.fr/lpsaintjames/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=63 (accessed March 15, 2017).
On the Fondation Charles de Gaulle’s website there is no mention of the Antillean troops in the composition of the FFL. http://www.charles-de-gaulle.org/pages/l-homme/dossiers-thematiques/1940-1944-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale/les-forces-francaises-libres/les-ffl/composition-des-ffl.php (accessed February 1, 2017).
3. See Miot, “Le retrait des tirailleurs sénégalais,” 77–89. Miot considers the wealth of reasons that motivated the French military hierarchy to withdraw their Sub-Saharan African troops from service, from concerns over their ability to withstand the cold to worries about contact between such troops and the French population following incidents during the campaign in Italy.
4. The estimated number of Dissidents varies between 2500 (Jennings, “La dissidence aux Antilles,” 56) and 4500 (Chauvet in Macey, Frantz Fanon, 80).
5. These old colonies were conquered in the first period of French colonization prior to the French Revolution.
6. This is representative of the field of French colonial history in general where there is a greater focus on the former colonial territories of North and West Africa, especially those of Algeria and Senegal.
7. For the sixtieth anniversary of the Provence landings (15 August 1944), President Chirac invited the leaders of all the former French colonies whose soldiers fought in the Forces Françaises Libres. There was no specific representative for the soldiers of the Antilles, La Réunion, New Caledonia or Tahiti.
8. Vergès, “Overseas France,” 166–7.
9. Palcy has also gained recognition as being the first female Black director to win a French César award and to be elected to the Council of the Oscars.
10. Aimé Césaire: une voix pour le XXIe siècle/ Aimé Césaire: a Voice for History (Palcy, 1994).
11. These 21 are composed of interviews with 16 male and 5 female Dissidents. There are also interviews with 2 inhabitants of the British islands to which the Dissidents travelled, one with a fisherman from Saint Lucia and another with a banker from Dominica, which recount the arrival of the Dissidents on their islands. It has not been possible to discover how and why these interviewees were chosen, though it must be noted that 50 years after the end of the conflict, Palcy would have had to work with an ever-decreasing number of participants.
12. Sempaire, La dissidence an tan Sorin, 17. I discuss the uses of the terms Dissident and Résistant in the Antillean context in more detail in my blog entry – “Dissidents or Résistants: What is in a Name?,” www.frenchempireww2.wordpress.com, (entry published June 14, 2016).
13. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 93.
14. Childers, Seeking Imperialism's Embrace, 35.
15. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 103.
16. Toureille, “La dissidence dans les Antilles françaises,” 71.
17. Jennings, “La dissidence aux Antilles,” 71.
18. Ibid., 72.
19. Paech, “The Mummy Lives!,” 59.
20. Langlois, “Images that Matter,” 465.
21. Interview with Romain Letchoumaen, exact wording.
22. http://www.charles-de-gaulle.org/media/pdf/cnrd_2004_complet.pdf, 9 (accessed February 1, 2017).
23. Ellen Hampton, Women of Valor: The Rochambelles on the WWII Front (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Evelyne Morin-Rotureau (ed), 1939–1945, combats de femmes : Françaises et Allemandes, les oubliées de l'histoire (Paris: Autrement – Ministère de la défense, Secrétariat général pour l'administration, Direction de la mémoire, du patrimoine et des archives, 2001). In a talk entitled ‘Femmes d’Outre-Mer dans la guerre’ at the Musée du Général Leclerc de Hauteclocque et de la Libération de Paris on 10 March 2012, Christine Levisse-Touze devoted only a few lines to the female Dissidents, but talked for more than 20 minutes about the Rochambelles.
24. Deroo, La force noire; Thomas, The French Colonial Mind.
25. Deroo, L’Illusion colonial.
26. Childers, “Departmentalization, Migration, and the Politics of the Family in the Post-war French Caribbean,” 187.
27. Despite their devotion to duty and their extraordinary achievements, many French (white) female fighters also struggled to gain official recognition at the Liberation.
28. Henry Joseph has been one of the leading campaigners, in his role as President of the association for Dissidents and veterans of the FFL in Martinique, for state recognition of the role played by the Dissidents. He co-authored a history of La Dissidence with Lucien-René Abénon, Les dissidents des Antilles dans les Forces françaises libres combattantes, 1940–1945.
29. The history of the Provence landings, on the webpage dedicated to the museum on the Chemins de Mémoire website, suggests that little has changed, as of all the colonial troops involved in the landings it is only those from the Antilles who are not explicitly named. http://www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/fr/memorial-du-debarquement-de-provence-mont-faron (accessed January 10, 2017).
30. New musical arrangements for these wartime songs were written for the film’s release.
32. Simone Veil, Présidente de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, December 2006, Press release for Grand Entretiens project. http://grands-entretiens.ina.fr/consulter/Shoah.
33. Waterson, “Trajectories of Memory,” 61.
35. See Bowles, “‘Ça fait d’excellents montages.”’
36. The choice of Depardieu is problematic. Although the benefits in terms of publicity of using a well-known French actor can be imagined, he has no documented personal connection to either the Dissidents or the Antilles. It also echoes colonial stereotypes that the only legitimate voice of authority is that of the French.
37. Jennings, “Monuments to Frenchness?,” 566.
38. It is only Fernand Aumis that wears his medals and the FFL insignia during his interview. One of these medals was awarded for his period of service during the Indochinese War (1946–54). The fact that he served for a longer period in the French Army than most of the Dissidents would perhaps have strengthened his connection to the French Army and influenced his decision to wear his medals.
40. Vergès makes this claim about the colonial history of France’s overseas territories more generally. Vergès, “Overseas France,” 169.
41. Both statements from Roger Gamess.
42. Testimony of Roger Gamess.
43. Testimony of Jeanne Catayée.
44. Sempaire, La dissidence an tan Sorin, 24. Because of the limited number of studies into La Dissidence, it has proved impossible to gauge to what extent these Dissidents are representative of the entire wartime cohort.
45. Muracciole, Les Français libres.
46. France’s civilizing mission preached that France had the right and the duty to colonize in order to take civilization to its colonies.
47. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory translation for nègre.
48. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 96.
49. Lagotien, quoted in Langlois, “Images that Matter,” 467.
50. Langlois, “Images that Matter,” 467.
51. Ibid., 471.
52. Clement quoted in Langlois, “Images that Matter,” 472.
53. Levaisseur, “De-essentializing the Banlieues,” 97.
54. Lemaire, “National History, Colonial History, Parallel Stories,” 426.
55. Many of these historians have grouped together as part of the ACHAC association (www.achac.com). In the early 1990s, Benjamin Stora claimed that he wanted his documentary Années Algériennes to shock the French public to the same extent as Max Ophüls’ Le Chagrin et la Pitié (1971). https://benjaminstora.univ-paris13.fr/index.php/articlesrecents/limage/339-le-documentaire-l-annees-algeriennes-r-par-guy-lagorce-in/-lexpress-10-septembre-1991.html, consulted 28/02/2017.
56. There have been a series of memorial laws passed by the French parliament to legislate on the memory and commemoration of events such as Transatlantic slavery (Taubira Law, 2001) and French colonization (Mekachera Law, 23 February 2005).
57. Chabal, A Divided Republic, 74. On the Indigènes de la République see http://indigenes-republique.fr/ (accessed September 24, 2017) and Lotem, “Anti-Racist Activism.” The Representative Council of Black Associations – https://le-cran.fr/ (consulted September 24, 2017).
58. See Veyrat-Masson and Blanchard, Les guerres de mémoires; Stora, La guerre des mémoires; Gensburger et Lefranc, A quoi servent les politiques de mémoire?
59. Foster, Women Film Directors, 297–8.
61. Black and Thompson detail how the majority of the 1.2 million African-Americans who served in the Second World War served in support units, and ‘did not train, camp or serve with White soldiers’, “A War within a War,” 33–4.
62. At least in the English-language version of her website.
63. Gill, “The Films of Euzhan Palcy,” 374.
64. Black and Thomas, “A War within a War,” 42.
65. Screened on France Ô on 23 January 2006 at 8.35 pm.
66. Screened on France 3 on 7 May 2007 at 11 pm.
68. www.ac-paris.fr/portail/jcma/p2_927400/parcours-de-dissidents-lhistoire-meconnue-des-resistants-antillais-pendant-la-seconde-guerre-mondiale (accessed November 20, 2014).
69. www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?ref_id=ip1389 (accessed February 4, 2015).
71. This partial awarding of the Légion d’honneur to the Dissidents is in contrast during the Presidency of François Hollande, where there has been a campaign to award the Légion d’honneur to all surviving Allied troops who took part in fighting in France in 1944/5. https://uk.ambafrance.org/Legion-d-honneur-for-British-World-War-II-veterans (accessed September 24, 2017).
72. Aimé Césaire: A Voice for History (Palcy, 1994). Screened at the Pantheon, Paris, 6 November 2011.
75. See “Hollande au Chemin des Dames pour réconcilier ‘les mémoires’” http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2017/04/17/hollande-au-chemin-des-dames-pour-reconcilier_5112488_823448.html#1vuMicWzyzMMvewG.99 (accessed September 9, 2017) and his speech on 19 March 2016 for the Journée nationale du souvenir Algérie-Maroc-Tunisie. There has, as yet, been relatively little academic work published on the Hollande Presidency, apart from two special issues, Modern and Contemporary France 22, no. 4 (2014) and French Politics 12, no. 2 (2014), which mainly looked at foreign and economic policy as well as his Presidential election campaign. Dr Jim House briefed the presidential team in advance of his Algeria speech of March 2016 and has provided me with an insight into debates around memory politics in the Elysée at this time. Nicola Firth has stated that Hollande has engaged in a policy of ‘strategic forgetfulness in the name of national unity’ in regards to the memory of slavery, by refusing to discuss the question of reparations. Firth, “Saving the Republic,” 218.
76. http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/politique/20121017.OBS6031/comment-hollande-s-est-empare-du-devoir-de-memoire.html, consulted 21/09/2017.
77. http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/177001044.html (accessed September 21, 2017).
78. A small stele in memory of the Dissidents was affixed to the war memorial in Trois-Îlets (Martinique) in 2010.