Conclusion: “Who Will Tell [the] Story?” History as Fiction, Fiction as History

What is it about?

The dominant narrative after WWII told a story of heroic and widespread French Resistance to Germany, protection of France’s Jewish population with a stress on the percentage of French Jews who survived, and major French participation in the Allied Victory. Beginning with Camus’s allegory The Plague, influential fiction writers and filmmakers, as well as the creators of the ground-breaking TV series A French Village, have come to grips with the ugly truth about French collaboration during the 1940-1944 German Occupation and especially French complicity in the Holocaust. Spanning several decades, these works, forming a mosaic, have had a major role in changing French history in the popular imagination. This mosaic challenges the once dominant narrative of France’s pervasive Resistance but also complements and enriches the evolving work of historians, many of whom I have cited. That a series of French presidents, along with most of the French public, increasingly admitted the truth resulted largely from these widely read and viewed works of art.

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Why is it important?

Fictional adaptations of historical events, whether in novels, films, or TV series, reveal truths that historians might miss or that the popular imagination wants to forget. By giving us the perspective of people living through historical circumstances, fiction and imaginative films engage us in the human drama which historians for all their research can rarely recreate. In other words, imagination and truth are partners. Fictional adaptations of historical events, whether in novels, films, or TV series, reveal truths that historians might miss or that the popular imagination wants to forget. By giving us the perspective of people living through historical circumstances, fiction and imaginative films engage us in the human drama which historians for all their research can rarely recreate. In other words, imagination and truth are partners. The works we have discussed enable readers and viewers to empathize with Jewish and other victims, admire courageous behavior, and understand the choices people had to make to survive. We ask ourselves what we would have done were we neither victims nor perpetrators but living under Nazi Occupation?