The Film That Explains Contemporary America
The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film in The Atlantic in 1972, David Denby called it “one of the greatest documentaries ever made,” and that remains true. What makes the film so effective is not how it looks at the Germans, a spectral presence, but how it chronicles the way that many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.
The director Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at 97, explores collaboration and resistance through the lens of a small city, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis established a puppet government headed by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain. Pétain’s former protégé Charles de Gaulle fled to Britain, coordinated resistance to the Nazis, and returned to lead a free France. The idea that the French almost uniformly opposed Nazism, with only a few bad apples collaborating, is foundational to France’s postwar identity. The problem, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, demonstrates, is that this is a myth.
Ophuls (who later became a U.S. citizen) interviews leaders of the Resistance, former guerrillas, an ex-Nazi soldier, an anti-Vichy politician who escaped prison in Clermont-Ferrand, and a French aristocrat who joined the Waffen-SS. Most revealingly, he speaks with ordinary residents who represented a big swath of French society: They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds. Although there’s no substitute for watching the whole film, four hours is a lot, so I have distilled a few important takeaways.
[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]
Old hatreds: When a society begins to break, the fault lines aren’t new. That is true in the U.S., where xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia are rampant, and where those in power have brought bigotry from the margins back to the fore. The same was true in France. “Anti-Semitism and anglophobia are feelings that are never hard to stir up in France. Even if reactions to such things are dormant or stifled, all it takes is one event” to make them come alive, Pierre Mendès France, a politician who served as prime minister in the 1950s, says in the film. The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media personalities, simply had to find the right propaganda to agitate the population and, if not win them over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government.
False neutrality: An authoritarian government doesn’t require support from a huge portion of the population, but it does require acquiescence. Many Vichy-era French tried to just live their life as though the crimes going on around them were not their concern. Denis Rake, a former undercover British agent, recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him, even at personal risk. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it. “The bourgeoisie, I must say, were very neutral. They didn’t help me much,” he says. “The bourgeoisie was scared. They had more to lose.” And an aging Resistance fighter scoffs at some fellow Frenchmen who protest that they would have fought back but hadn’t known how to join the Resistance: “Somehow an old fool like me knew how, and they didn’t.”
Corrupting the state: The Nazi occupation required co-opting institutions that had previously been neutral and turning them into tools for repressing dissent. “If the Germans had only had their own Gestapo, they couldn’t have caused half the harm they did,” the former Communist leader Jacques Duclos says. “If the French police had not helped seek out the Communists, not to mention all the other patriots, the Germans would have made a stab in the dark, but they could never have hit as hard as they hit the French Resistance.” When President Trump tries to use the National Guard, Marine troops, and agents from Customs and Border Protection or ICE to stifle protests and achieve political goals, he risks the same corruption of institutions created to protect the populace.
[Timothy W. Ryback: Hitler used a bogus crisis of ‘public order’ to make himself dictator]
Who goes fascist: Two of the most important forces driving the American far right are negative polarization—politics motivated by a hatred of the opposing side—and disaffection of young men. Some of the most riveting footage in the film comes from Ophuls’s interview with Christian de La Mazière, a wealthy Frenchman who served in the Waffen-SS and was willing to speak frankly about it. He attributes his decisions to his family’s anti-communism and royalism. “For people like us, there really wasn’t any choice,” he says. “We couldn’t choose the Communists, so we had to choose the other revolutionary party, which was fascism.” But he also acknowledges that, as for some on the MAGA right today, the transgressiveness of Nazism appealed to him and his friends: “It was a way of rebelling against our families. The first images we saw of Nuremberg were like a new religion to us. We were astounded.”
Coalition of the willing: Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over. In one affecting moment, Ophuls asks Resistance Colonel Raymond Sarton du Jonchay, “Are you a republican?” Sarton du Jonchay sighs, smiles wistfully, and admits, “Not really.” “You’re more of a monarchist?” “Yes, that’s right,” he says. (Unlike de La Mazière, here is a royalist who held on to his beliefs without succumbing to fascism.) Another Resistance fighter attributes his involvement not to any high-flown principles but to anger at Germans getting the best food and imposing curfews.
My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era, “When this is all over, nobody will admit to ever having supported it.” I thought about that a lot while watching The Sorrow and the Pity, which showed how true it was in France. But the documentary is ambiguous on what a society should do about that. One old guerrilla says that he knows that informers continue to live around him. He cannot forget the betrayals, but he also doesn’t seek revenge. Ophuls makes a case that remembering what happened is essential, but he leaves for viewers to decide whether it’s more important to effect justice or to simply coexist with those who see the error of their ways, even if they do not admit it.