Robert Skidelsky death – some recollections Bill Mitchell. He gave a very nice blurb for my book.
The Film That Explains Contemporary America
The Atlantic – Gift Article: “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.
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.
