The Drama of Fallen France: Reading la Comedie sans Tickets

5. The Politics of Intention: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone via Oreste

5 The Politics of Intention: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone via Oreste Introduction When critics and historians try to classify the politics of plays written and produced during the Occupation, they inevitably operate between those polar opposites, “resistance” and “collaboration” and attempt to identify how a playwright intended his or her work to be construed. Collaboration, as I have used it in the previous chapter, implies more than just a sympathy for the Germans and their policies; it carries the idea of some actual participation on their behalf. Simone Jollivet, for example, may have made remarks that indicated her support of the Nazis, but we have no evidence that she in fact did anything to help their cause. True, her sympathies were deplorable, but how and with whom did she actively collaborate? Even if we wish to regard The Princess of Ursins as in some way vindicating a fascist view of womanhood, which at best it does only in part and which the collaborationist press certainly failed to grasp, we must remember too that the script was probably completed before the Occupation began. With regard to “resistance,” I have noted in this book’s overture, John F. Sweets’s proposal to move the definition beyond “the activities of the organized resistance movements” to one that takes into account the general atmosphere that nurtured and encouraged such activities. “A broader construction of the term resistance, involving active opposition to the Vichy regime and the Germans, is admittedly unwieldy,” Sweets concludes. “But it is also truer to the complex reality of the resistance in France” (224). Clearly Sweets is suggesting that “the resistance in France” is not the same as “the Résistance in France.” 105 106 THE DRAMA OF FALLEN FRANCE Henry Rousso in his study of how France in the present has come to view the France of the past, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, discusses what he calls the “resistancialist myth,” according to which the majority of those who remained in France between 1940 and 1944 were, whether or not they had actually worked for the Résistance, at least in sympathy with it. This idea of France as a nation of resistors, initiated by Charles De Gaulle in his speeches following the Liberation of Paris in 1944, began to decline in popularity only in the late 1960s (302–303), when, as Rousso tells us, “[h]istorians set out to penetrate the veils thrown up by Robert Aron . . .” (305). Rousso explains that “the intrinsically ideological nature of the resistancialist myth . . . accounts for its weakness . . .” for “[i]t was unable to accommodate experiences of the Occupation that had nothing to do with resistance” (303). Two important works helped demolish resistancialism: Marcel Ophuls’s searing 1971 documentary on French wartime anti-Semitism, Le Chagrin et la pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity), and Robert Paxton’s 1972 unflinching reevaluation of the Pétain government, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944. As the resistantialist myth has receded, some historians and critics have gone back to take a look at all that has been made of the Occupation, while others have begun to examine those experiences from the period, which the myth could not, as Rousso puts it, “accommodate” and had thus excluded. The result has been a counter and far less flattering image of the role France played in the War, in the Occupation, and in the Holocaust. A similar reversal may be detected in studies of the wartime stage. As I have previously mentioned, when the War ended, Philip Toynbee voiced the opinion that “[t]he Germans appear to have interfered very little with the freedom of the Paris stage, and there has been a varied and fertile dramatic activity” (156). Of course, in reality the Germans and the Vichy government had frequently interfered with “freedom of the stage,” and as I have indicated earlier, the theatre under the Occupation was neither as varied nor as fertile as it had been before (and would be after) the War. From the Liberation onward, many serious critics of stage literature and theatre historians avoided looking at the issue of “resistant” and/or “collaborationist ” theatre by using lenses framed by what cinema critics would come to call “auteurism”: By focusing their discussions on the body of work by a particular playwright or of a particular director, they could ignore the political and historical contexts and problems. For example, André Roussin, in an essay on Jean...