My experience in France challenged some of the knowledge I had going into the study abroad program. It often conflicted with American perspectives of the events of WWII, while it also offered opportunities to see the physical sites where WWII events took place for the first time. The first place we went to was the Caen Memorial Museum, which related to my personal expertise report of the French civilian perspective during the Allied liberation. Even before entering my first French museum, the idea that the French would shy away from discussing collaboration with the Nazis made me wonder what I was going to see or how bad it would be. Throughout the museum, the writing on the displays told the history from a biased French viewpoint. The creators of the Caen museum focused on the actions of Germany and Italy, devoting very little space to how France’s own political climate fell apart over the years from 1918 onward. I thought the wording was interesting on many of the displays, because they placed great emphasis on French innocence. They also did not mention much about the collaborationist aspect and described Germany’s 1940 takeover in a way that removed blame from France. For their displays on civilian and Allied interactions during the Battle of Normandy, I really tried to spend time looking at it to see how they would share that part of it. The writing indicated at one point that the French were more responsible for liberating towns on their own than we have interpreted or learned from our studies.
Another museum that helped explain the French perspective of WWII was Les Invalides, which is a military history museum that talked about the French history throughout various wars, ending with WWII. Les Invalides showed how the French remembered WWII in more detail than the Caen Memorial Museum and focused even less on the American efforts with the Allies. There was hardly any mention of wartime deportations and specifically the deportation of Jews. There was also only a small section on Vichy compared to the French Resistance, but was still more detailed than the Caen Memorial Museum was in this subject. Both Les Invalides and the Caen Memorial Museum forced me to question how Americans portray their own history and look at biases that are throughout it that I may have originally interpreted as solid facts. There were descriptions of French involvement in WWII that caused our class to discuss whether our own knowledge was actually correct. Ultimately, we tried to remove both American and French biases to internalize a more neutral version of WWII. For example, we wanted to determine more neutrally what kinds of roles the French had in their own liberation and in resistance to German occupation.
Outside of museum visits, it is important to acknowledge the work France has done to remember D-Day by preserving the beaches and memorializing those who lost their lives in the process. Visiting Utah Beach and Omaha Beach helped create concrete images in my mind of what the D-Day invasion was like. What really added to the experience of both beaches was Pointe du Hoc, where we were able to walk and crawl into old German bunkers and bomb craters. Instead of just reading about the war in written paragraphs on display boards, we got to see the physical representation of the war by standing on the beach and seeing the effects of the bombings.
