Gender, subjectivity and the writer’s voice: Historicising the French Resistance, 1940-1970s

Abstract

From 1940 until the 1970s, resisters sought to preserve the resistance for posterity and thus dominated the historicisation of the resistance: under the Occupation they published clandestine newspapers, and from the Liberation onwards, they wrote histories, essays, memoirs and both collected and gave testimonies. This thesis argues that the interrelation between genre, gender and subjectivity was a key dynamic in this process. It demonstrates that the choice of genre affected what was said about the resistance and by whom. Through an exploration of genre, this thesis argues that that men were more likely to foreground their subjectivity, whereas women were more likely to marginalise their own subject position. Women were nevertheless actively involved within this process of historicisation, and this thesis argues that the genre of history allowed women to embrace their marginal position and to use it as an asset. This thesis shows how the production of testimonial sources for the Commission d’Histoire de l’Occupation et de la Libération de la France (CHOLF) project, which began in 1944, provided a space in which women made an important contribution to historical understandings of the resistance as both interviewer and interviewee. The paradox of women writing about the resistance but not about their own resistance is a central theme of this thesis, which draws on archival and published sources to argue that by embracing and adapting the traditional ‘female’ roles of remembering and memorialising from the margins, women became key participants in the historicisation of the French resistance. It explores the tensions between the reliance on subjective experience and the claim to have written ‘objective’, ‘scientific’ and yet also ‘authentic’ accounts of resistance life. Tracing the discourses to the 1970s shows how women’s resistance was increasingly understood as crucial to the resistance fight. Fundamentally, the thesis demonstrates that despite changes over time, women were central to the formation of the gendered narratives of resistance from the very beginning.

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