Sudden Courage by Ronald C. Rosbottom

Author:Ronald C. Rosbottom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Resisting the Resistance

Modern tyranny is terror management.

—TIMOTHY SNYDER

In January 1943, two months after the Germans had invaded the so-called “Free” Zone, thereby occupying all of France, a gutsy professional, the police chief of a district in the southern city of Toulouse, wrote the following statement to the prefect of the département:

I refuse—and the responsibility is completely mine—to persecute Jews, who, in my opinion, have the same right to life and happiness as M. Laval himself.

I refuse to drag French workers by force from their families. I hold firmly to the idea that it is not our duty to deport our compatriots, and that any Frenchman complicit in this infamy, even should his name be Philippe Pétain, acts as a traitor.

I stand by each and every word that I have used.1

Our souls stir at such courage. But being moved diminishes the cost that such a letter to his superiors would have incurred. If he were lucky, only Commissaire Philippe’s job would be in jeopardy. He would have been immediately relieved of his duties, and probably of his pension. His family would have consequently suffered because of his actions. At worst, he would have been arrested, publicly humiliated, perhaps even jailed. He would not have been sent to Germany or executed, for he doubtless had many supporters among his men and in the community. Still, displays of this sort of public courage were rare among French police officers, who rounded up—and this is no exaggeration—more than 90 percent of the Jews, communists, and other “undesirables” targeted by the Occupational Authority and the Gestapo during the war years.

In his examination of guerrilla (now called asymmetric) warfare or military engagement, the political theorist Michael Walzer makes exquisite distinctions between those who refuse to accept the terms of a treaty or armistice and the expectations of a victorious army. There was a major moral and military conundrum at the various stages of the resistance by French civilians to occupying forces between 1940 and 1945. The distinctions were muddied by the fact that so many different entities were “resisting” a common enemy, but they often also “resisted” the actions of their fellow combatants as well. Early in the Occupation, many French citizens thought that resistance, armed or not, would put them in danger from a nervous German army, one they hoped would soon leave their country. Does post-treaty resistance activity have an obligation to protect citizens who might be held hostage to that activity? Nevertheless, Walzer argues that “after national surrender, if there are still values worth defending, no one can defend them except ordinary men and women, citizens with no political or legal standing. [That] leads us to grant these men and women a kind of moral authority.” But he also recognizes that such acts almost always placed the resisters in jeopardy, for, in the rules of war, “resistance is legitimate, and the punishment of resistance is legitimate.”2

From June 1940 until November 1942, there were two “Frances”—the Occupied and “Free” (Unoccupied) zones. From the

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