In the months leading up to my departure to Europe, countless well-traveled persons told me “French people just don’t like Americans, don’t take it personally.” Yet, upon arrival in Bayeux, France the first thing I laid eyes on was a sign in a café window that read “We welcome our liberators.” I continued to encounter this paradox throughout my nine day stay in France. Bayeux, where we spent our first six days on French soil, is in the lower Normandy region of France. It is a quaint town that boasts a rich history as the home to the Bayeux tapestry, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England, an imposing Romanesque-Gothic cathedral consecrated by William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo of Bayeux in 1077, and, most recently, is known as the first major town liberated by the Allies during Operation Overlord in June 1944. The Norman peoples of this town, and indeed, the Normandy region, are a rather quiet, serious bunch. The looks that my fellow American comrades and I received while walking about, dining, and relaxing showed that they are not used to the clamor we Yank’s tend to make. Some of my group and I went to a football game one night in Caen, Normandy, and there were a few times that I noticed I was the only person in the entire section standing up and cheering. And yet I never felt uncomfortable, and especially not hated, by the French people.
However, what made me uncomfortable was the awkward way that the people, museums, and businesses of the area handled American involvement, invasion, and presence in and around Normandy during World War II. St. Mere Eglise, the landing spot of many Allied paratroopers landings in the early hours of 6 June 1944, had a dummy-paratrooper strung from the church tower. We watched a D-Day video at Arromanches that showed French toddlers and kittens back to back with Allied bombings of French towns and German armaments. At the end of this was a montage of French landscapes and attractions and in between flashes of Mont St. Michel and the Notre Dame was a quick image of the American Cemetery in Normandy. There were countless advertisements for an impending D-Day festival. Many of the memorials and museums overplayed France’s involvement in various military efforts during the war and downplayed American and British aid. The Caen memorial seemed to put the blame of collaboration on the backs of Phillippe Petain and Pierre Laval, leaving out the fact that collaboration was widespread during the German occupation and these men received great amounts of support at one point in time. In a shop window in Paris, a decal read “We are all collaborators.” This was the first time I saw these events glorified and the first time I saw the war being explained from the French point of view.
As a business student, I found the storefront advertisement particularly strange. The French typically chose to ignore or whitewash their collaborationist experiences during the war, yet here is a prominent advertisement using the idea of collaboration as a marketing device! And as an American citizen, compatriot to many of the men who fought and died to liberate France and greater Europe, I was shocked by the commercialization and celebration of D-Day and the Normandy landings. I believe that such promotions and statements are damaging to the memory and valor of those men. My comrades and I had a round-table discussion about these problems prior to entering the British War Cemetery. I understand that a nation must explain their history one way or another. The United States has a hard time of it ourselves, with our nation’s many historical shames. In my report on Charles Glass’s book American’s in Paris, I put forth the idea that it is easy to scoff at collaborators as a nation that has never experienced invasion and occupation. And so there must be a kind of middle ground between the American and French explanations of France during occupation and Operation Overlord that explains what truly happened. Yet, the French people need to come to an agreement on how they promote their national history. Were they a nation of helpless kittens, a nation of wily resistance and military valor, or do they simply seek profit from whichever history they see fit?
Storefront advertisement – Paris, France
Memorial at Angoville Church. “In honour and recognition of Robert E. Wright (a Buckeye!) Kenneth J. Moore Medics… 101st Airborne Division for Humane and Life saving care rendered … in this church in June 1944”