Although France’s current identity crisis can be understood as a function of changing demographics, unemployment, immigration, racism…, it is arguable anchored in unresolved attitudes about France’s participation in World War II. The battle over wartime memories has been raging in the media and the arts for the past 25 years, starting with the vehement reactions to Marcel Ophuls’s 1972 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity about the German Occupation. Although some have categorized the contemporary period as postmodern and hence, ahistorical, most would agree that France has not been able to transcend the heated historical, political, and legal debates about collaboration and resistance in World War II, nor has it turned away from attempts to represent/enact such issues in film, literature, memoir, interview… Henry Rousso’s final state of the “Vichy Syndrome”, the period of obsession and guilt from the seventies on, has not led to a decisive settling of meaning for the French about their participation in the War. If France’s ongoing struggle at self-definition in the postwar, postcolonial era involves new definitions of citizenship and nationality, it has also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of its past in which to see itself.

Because of film’s accessibility and popularity, it is perhaps the most forceful of art forms in articulating a public sense of the historical and political stakes of the War, In addition to its capacity to reflect and shape popular views of past events, film allows for and promotes the airing of current concerns through the lens of memory’s (re)creations, The abundant, concurrent (although not necessarily overlapping) reappraisals in the seventies of World War II on the one hand, and of women’s socio-political positions in France on the other, have fostered in the eighties and nineties a new commitment to both the portrayal and analysis of French women’s involvement in the War. Because women’s roles during the Occupation of France have often been overlooked or neglected in both fictional renderings and historical accounts, there is a senses for both critics and creators alike that it is time to review the intersections of women’s lives with the history of the Occupation.

One of the most powerful and constant symbols or national contradiction in postwar films about the Occupation resides in fact in the representations of women, Following France’s tradition of symbolizing itself through women, 1 an amazing number of films about the Occupation feature women as ambiguous symbols of this troubled history, My paper concentrated on the ways female characters have often become focal points for the working through of France’s uneasy relationship to a past in which “collaborators’ and ‘resisters” inhabit the same space and sometimes the same body, thereby problematizing tidy political distinctions. 2

I consider links between women’s actual participation in the war, their roles in Occupation films, and the fact that they gained the right to vote at the end of the war. (I rely heavily on Noel Burch’s and Geneviève Sellier’s work to articulate some of the major characteristics of women’s representations of the period. 3) I then consider some of the war films from later periods that feature women as ambiguous characters working through France’s moral dilemmas. I will be arguing that the strong image of women during the war is taken up again in postwar films, but in ambivalent ways that reflect France’s own difficulty in coming to terms with a murky past. Films to be discussed will be taken from different periods, with an emphasis on the iconic quality of the female characters. (possible examples: Babette s’en va-t-en guerre, Le Dernier Métro, Une Affaire de femmes, and Lucie Aubrac).

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1 See the works of Maurice Agulhon on the icon of Marianne in French history, for example, Les Métamorphoses de Marianne: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1914 à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion, 2001).

2 In some ways, France under the Occupation and its subsequent memories of it can help us understand our post 9/11 anxieties, pointing out what kinds of issues arise when “the enemy” is in our midst, when daily life is infused with terror rather being confined to a distant battlefield. It may well tell us too about the costs of mythification.

3 Noel Burch and Geneviève Sellier, La Drôle de Guerre des sexes du cinéma français 1939-1956 (Paris: Nathan, 1996).