The French Resistance and Its Legacy by Rod Kedward (review)

Reviewed by: The French Resistance and Its Legacy by Rod Kedward Robert Gildea Kedward, Rod – The French Resistance and Its Legacy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 148 p. For 50 years Rod Kedward has dominated the study of the French Resistance in Britain and has been rightly honoured in France. This work, which he has published at the age of 85, is a think piece about his career working on the Resistance and offers wonderful insights into his contribution to a field that has changed significantly over time. When Kedward went to France to begin interviewing former resisters in 1969, he was confronted by two embedded discourses of heroism: the Gaullist and the Communist. Marcel Ophuls's Le Chagrin et la Pitié, just released but banned from television for another 10 years, told another story of resisters as oddballs, mavericks, and eccentrics. Kedward cut through these stereotypes with a grassroots approach that gave a voice to resisters, most of whom were ordinary people who wanted to "faire quelque chose" (p. 20). At this point, oral history was still a fledgling approach; the Oral History Society was founded in 1973. However, in the 1970s, the French archives for this period were still closed and Kedward's Resistance in Vichy France (1978) drew on resistance literature and his own interviews. By the time he wrote his second book, In Search of the Maquis (1993), archival material was available, but he still did interviews. He had to confront French historians who expressed scepticism about the reliability of testimony and blocked oral history with the stock response that "memory does not constitute history" (p. 36). Elegantly, Kedward includes extracts from his interviews as a coda to most of the chapters of this book. Avoiding Paris and criss-crossing southern France, Kedward emphasized from the start the importance of context, of time and place. His chapter on "The Specificity of Place" takes the case of Georges Guingouin, the village schoolteacher who End Page 209 organized the maquis in the Limousin, using and building on its regional identity, not least the history of the "Red Spring" of 1905 in Limoges when the porcelain workers went on strike. Kedward links place to the role of myth and memory in mobilizing resistance. He famously argued that resistance in the Cévennes harked back to the myth of the Camisard revolt against Louis XIV's repression of Protestants, while resistance in the Pyrenean department of the Aude draw on the story of the Cathar heretics. In 1979, Kedward interviewed the Aubracs in their Paris flat. He was now coming to recognize the importance of women in the Resistance. They had remained at the margins because of the macho discourse of resistance and their own modesty, but he realized that they were key to the networking of resistance, acting as liaison agents, mending contacts that had been broken by arrests, "the woman at the door" observing the street and sending Germans the wrong way. He quotes Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Francis Cammaerts, interviewed in 1991, who said "Without the women there could have been no Resistance" (p. 106). His recounts the betrayal he felt in 1997 when a tribunal of historians effectively put the Aubracs on trial, implying that they had made their stories up and may had a responsibility for the arrest of Jean Moulin. It was an ugly settling of accounts by Daniel Cordier and his allies, seeking to dethrone the Aubracs as Top Resisters and not without a dose of misogyny. In 2004, Kedward was very quickly onto the significance of the discovery of the writings of the Russian Jewish exile Irène Némirowsky, who had been deported from her hiding place in Burgundy to Auschwitz in 1942. When they were published as Suite française, there was much debate as to whether they were fact or fiction. Kedward, who championed Némirowsky, did not think that this was the most interesting question. The Resistance, he recalls here, was a "theatre of dissimulation" (p. 118). Resisters took false identities, made up cover stories, were inspired by fictional characters. Le Silence de la mer, published clandestinely in 1942 by Jean Bruller under the pseudonym Vercors, was...