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The best thing I’ve seen in the past year was an epic long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One battle after anotherwinner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was Sadness and pitya four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Movie review in 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 describes the way many ordinary citizens simply lived their lives as if nothing had changed.
Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls, who died last year at the age of 97, explores cooperation and resistance through the lens of a small town, Clermont-Ferrand. It’s about an hour from Vichy, where the Nazis set up a puppet government led by 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 Free France. The idea that the French were almost uniformly opposed to Nazism, with only a few bad apples cooperating, is fundamental to France’s postwar identity. The problem is, as Ophuls, a Franco-German Jew, shows, this is a myth.
Ophuls (who later became an American citizen) interviews resistance leaders, ex-guerrillas, a former Nazi soldier, an anti-Vichy politician who escaped from Clermont-Ferrand prison, and a French aristocrat who joined the Waffen-SS. Most tellingly, he speaks to ordinary residents who represented a large part of French society: They did not actively cooperate, but by rejecting resistance and acquiescing to the government, they made the occupation possible. I have seen many examples, over 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 USA is far from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons of complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds. While there’s no substitute for watching the entire film, four hours is a lot, so I’ve picked out a few important takeaways.
Old Hatreds: When society begins to fracture, the fault lines are not new. This is true in the US, where xenophobia, antisemitismand Islamophobia are on the rampage, and those in power have brought intolerance back from the margins in the foreground. It was the same in France. “Anti-Semitism and Anglophobia are feelings that are never difficult to arouse in France. Even if reactions to such things are dormant or muted, it only takes one event” to revive them, Pierre Mendès France, a politician who was prime minister in the 1950s, says in the film. The Vichy regime, like MAGA politicians and media figures, simply had to find the right propaganda to unsettle the population and, if not win over, at least drive them away from other groups that might threaten the government.
False Neutrality: An authoritarian government does not require the support of the vast majority of the population, but it does require consent. Many French people of the Vichy era tried to just live their lives as if the crimes going on around them were none of their business. Denis Rake, a former British secret agent, recalls that the working-class French were eager to help and protect him, even at personal risk. Those who were more affluent preferred to stay away from 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 elderly Resistance fighter mocks some fellow French who are protesting to fight back, but didn’t know how to join the Resistance movement: “Somehow an old fool like me knew how, and they didn’t.”
Corrupts the state: The Nazi occupation required co-opting previously neutral institutions and turning them into tools for suppressing dissent. “If the Germans had only had their Gestapo, they wouldn’t have been able to do half the damage they did,” says former communist leader Jacques Duclos. “If the French police hadn’t helped hunt down the communists, not to mention all the other patriots, the Germans would have been in the dark, but they would never have been able to hit as hard as they hit the French Resistance.” When President Trump tries to use the National Guard, the Marines, and agents of Customs and Border Protection, or ICE, to quell protests and achieve political goals, he risks the same corruption of institutions created to protect the population.
Who becomes a fascist: Two of the most important forces driving the American far right are negative polarization—politics motivated by hatred of the opposing side—and the discontent of young people. Some of the most interesting footage in the film comes from Ophuls’ interview with Christian de La Mazière, a wealthy Frenchman who served in the Waffen-SS and was willing to speak candidly about it. He attributes his decisions to the anti-communism and royalism of his family. “For people like us, there was really no choice,” he says. “We could not choose the communists, so we had to choose another revolutionary party, which was fascism.” But he also admits it, as far as it goes some on MAGA just todaythe transgressiveness of Nazism attracted him and his friends: “It was a way of rebelling against our families. The first pictures of Nuremberg we saw were like a new religion for us. We were stunned.”
Coalition of the Willing: The restoration of democracy required the opponents of fascism – nationalists, republicans and communists – to work together despite serious doubts about each other’s positions. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over. In one poignant 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 stuck to his convictions without succumbing to fascism.) Another Resistance fighter attributes his involvement not to any lofty principles, but to anger at the Germans getting the best food and the imposition of a curfew.
My colleague David Frum once wrote about the Trump era“When this is all over, no one will admit they ever supported it.” I thought about that a lot while watching Sadness and pitywhich showed how true this was in France. But the documentary is ambiguous about what society should do about it. An old guerrilla says he knows that informers still live around him. He cannot forget the betrayals, but he does not seek revenge either. Ophuls argues that remembering what happened is important, but leaves viewers to decide whether it’s more important to do justice or simply coexist with those who see the error of their ways, even if they don’t admit it.
