In class and through my own research this semester, I’ve learned how Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French during WWII, defined resistance to Nazi occupation only as military action carried out by men beneath his command. This narrow definition could be a result of his own status as a military man and a potential desire to recognize only those who were loyal to him in the wide range of resistance networks. His limited view of resistance excluded the significant contributions of most of those who resisted the occupation from the French public memory. The subtle and small day-to-day resistance efforts conducted by resistants throughout France were ignored. Since most French women resisted non-violently, very few of them received recognition in the decades after the war, even though women comprised around 25% of active resistants.
De Gaulle’s definition of resistance as an affair for military men was extremely apparent in Paris’ Musée de L’Ordre de La Libération in Les Invalides. The Order of Liberation was created in November 1940 by De Gaulle to honor the fighters who made significant contributions to the liberation of France, and the museum recognizes them. Upon walking in, one is met with a wall of faces of De Gaulle’s Companions of Liberation. Only six are women, and nearly all the faces are white, even though black men from Senegal and North Africa comprised the bulk of De Gaulle’s army. It doesn’t make sense why France continues to tell this narrow narrative of resistance in one of Paris’ most popular history museums. While Les Invalides is focused on the military side of France’s history, perpetuating De Gaulle’s military view of resistance without addressing the other avenues of resistance is a misrepresentative half-truth that continues to ignore the significant contributions of women and men of color.
Germaine Tillion and Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz, the niece of Charles de Gaulle, are two significant women resistants excluded from the Musée de L’Ordre de La Libération. Only two miles away from Les Invalides, they are interred in the Pantheon, a monument constructed to honor the “great men” of France. These two women were moved to the Pantheon in 2015 as a result of a movement that began in the 1970s to recognize women for their unique contributions to the Resistance. Only six women have been interred in the Pantheon compared to the fifty-four Frenchmen honored there, so their recognition marked progress in the recognition of women resistants and the dissolution of France’s patriarchal structure. I had the privilege of visiting their graves and seeing how the women I’d spent months researching were properly honored. Yet I was shocked at their complete absence from the museum. How can two women important enough to enter into the extremely exclusive Pantheon be given no mention or even a separate exhibit in Paris’ museum to liberation? France’s selective telling of its resistance history in different spaces suggests that their memory of the Resistance may not have progressed as much as my research indicated, and that more work must be done to tell a cohesive history of French Resistance that doesn’t center solely on De Gaulle’s chosen white men.