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CHAPTER 1
Repertoires of Resistance
Musical Resources for Reimagining the Nation
Recounting one of the most brazen acts of open defiance during the Occupation, actor Paul Meurisse described an evening at the A.B.C. music hall in Paris during the winter of 1941. Sitting backstage, awaiting her turn to take the spotlight, Edith Piaf listened to murmurs that rose from the French audience. Onstage, singer Marc Hely was finishing his set with a virulent attack on the English government. The German officers snickered, but the French, many of whom still hoped for a British victory, were not laughing. In response to the expressions of displeasure conveyed by her compatriots, Piaf pushed past the stage manager and into the spotlight. "Le Fanion de la Légion!" she yelled to the conductor. Turning to face the balcony of German officers, Piaf sang the tale of thirty French Legion soldiers holed up in a small fort in the Sahara under attack by enemy "bastards" in a fictitious colonial battle. Forcefully pronouncing each French word, she sang the story of Legion soldiers fighting bravely despite the hunger and casualties that decimated their numbers. The tempo quickened and the instrumentation crescendoed at the point in the song's narrative when the enemy seizes the Legion's flag, a tattered but powerful source of inspiration for the four soldiers who remain inside the fort. Just when it seems that all hope of victory is lost, Piaf sang, Legion reinforcements arrive to rescue their comrades, who have replaced the stolen flag with one drawn "on their stomachs, black with blood." Piaf's inspired performance drew cries of affirmation from her French listeners, who erupted into shouts and whistles. The next day, officials summoned Piaf to their headquarters and informed her that the song was officially blacklisted.
Piaf's performance was one of the most courageous attempts to use popular music as a medium for dissent and weapon of resistance in German Occupied France between 1940 and 1944. In a climate of aggressive censorship and political repression, this kind of open defiance was rare. Indeed, after its swift fall to Germany in the summer of 1940, France rallied around its new leader, the World War I hero Philippe Pétain, and acquiesced to his plan of collaboration. On June 17, Pétain announced to the nation that he had agreed to head the new government, headquartered in the spa town of Vichy, and was asking the Germans for an armistice. Arguing that sustained fighting would prove militarily and politically dangerous, the general urged French people to lay down their arms and accept France's misfortune. Continued warfare, he claimed, would result in the utter annihilation of the French military and eliminate the possibility of an independent French government. Furthermore, Pétain insisted that an armistice would guarantee France an honorable, though subordinate, place in Hitler's new Europe. The suffering France would endure under the Germans would be brief, he claimed, and would provide the opportunity for the nation to shed its purported obsession with individual liberty. Offering himself up "as a gift to attenuate the country's deep misfortune," Pétain was met with wild public approval. Across the nation, people lifted him above the stature of modern-day king, laying gifts of local soil at his feet, raising his portrait behind church altars, and comparing him to the country's original savior, Joan of Arc.
On June 22, 1940, the French signed the armistice with Germany at the same forest in Compiègne where Germany had surrendered in 1918. The agreement divided the nation into an Occupied zone that would be controlled directly by Germany and an Unoccupied zone that would be administered by Vichy in collaboration with the Reich. The armistice also required France to accept the demobilization of its military and allowed the nation only a small armistice army of 100,000 troops. Existing weaponry was to be handed over to the conqueror or kept under guard. A particularly severe stipulation demanded that France accept Germany's imprisonment of over 1.6 million prisoners of war — the most men taken prisoner in the history of warfare — until a peace treaty would conclude the war. The armistice also required France to pay the costs of its own occupation, a figure that ranged from 400 million to 500 million francs per day because of rapid inflation. By the end of Vichy's reign, these costs reached 65 billion francs, accounting for 60 percent of the national budget. Although the conditions of the armistice were harsh, Vichy lauded the agreement as a safeguard against the full brunt of German repression. Believing that Germany would win the war, Vichy held that a policy of collaboration was the best way to protect France's overseas possessions and domestic interests during the Occupation and to ensure its prosperous future in Hitler's Europe after the war ended.
Yet, by the time Piaf gave her rousing performance of "Le Fanion de la Légion" at the end of 1941, the promise of Pétain's plan was beginning to fade. Plagued by food and clothing shortages and crippling inflation, French citizens started to recognize the material costs of the armistice with Germany. As Paul Simon, an active member of the Resistance and editor of a clandestine newspaper, wrote in his account of Occupied Paris in 1942, the Germans "are interfering with everything." Whereas in 1871 they "occupied only," now "they have installed themselves in the railways, public administration, police forces, banks, insurance companies, press, wireless, films, law and education. They are everywhere, even in the so-called unoccupied zone," he complained. Set against a backdrop of rising discontent during an unusually cold winter, Piaf's performance gave voice to these feelings of resentment and desire for revenge, even though it made no specific call to resist Nazi Occupation. Indeed, the song did not even chronicle the military exploits of the French army, but told the fictitious tale of foreign légionnaires. Given the subject of the song, the performance raises important questions about the power of music as a signifier of nationalism under the Occupation. How did a song about the Foreign Legion — a military branch made up of mostly non-French soldiers — provoke strong patriotic sentiments in a French audience? What vision of the nation did Piaf's performance conjure? How did the act of singing, often presumed to be apolitical entertainment, help Piaf to launch a substantive critique of France's situation under the Occupation and Vichy?
In order to answer these questions and understand how song served as a potent symbol of the French nation during World War II, we must examine the meanings that had been invested in singing before Piaf took the stage. I argue in this chapter that the French audience's reaction to Piaf's performance was not automatic, but contingent upon a unique cultural history that established singing as a significant mode of democratic participation and transformed leading genres of song into representations of competing constructions of French nationhood. This history, I maintain, was vital to the project of resistance because it endowed music with meanings that responded directly to the collaborationist government's attempts to rearticulate French national identity along political and ideological lines. Begun by France's Revolutionary partisans and continued by the soldiers of the Great War, singing had been prefigured as the natural mode of communication for a democratic people who insisted upon voicing their political grievances. Citizens throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considered chanson — the term for popular French songs — to be the musical expression of the nation. Yet, by 1940, another musical genre threatened to eclipse chanson. Jazz — considered not only as a symbol of cosmopolitanism and freedom but also as American hegemony, racial impurity, and gender confusion — offered citizens new resources out of which to craft an alternative, "modern" vision of the nation. Ultimately, jazz provided tools for the contestation of Vichy's strict gender and racial norms, while chanson remained an ideal inventional resource for the rhetorical marking of French republican nationhood.
Republican Repertoires: Singing from the Revolution to the First World War
The logic behind Piaf's decision to use singing as a mode of protest, and the patriotic nature of her audience's reaction come to light when viewed within the context of French political singing. Indeed, her performance was not an isolated moment of politicized music making, but rather was rooted in the nation's long-standing tradition of republican singing. According to historian Laura Mason, singing became a national mode of civic engagement during the Revolutionary period (1789–1799), providing one of the "most commonly used means of communication" for partisans who were often denied access to the public sphere based on their lack of social standing or education. Easily circulated between print and oral cultures, songs provided a common resource through which all people negotiated pressing political and cultural contestations. By the end of the Revolution, Mason contends, the French no longer sang merely to entertain themselves or voice a common complaint. Instead, singing had become a means by which the French participated in civic life, "evok[ing] a concrete political heritage and a set of claims for a more equitable and inclusive polity." Singing demonstrated that the political sphere was not the possession of political elites, but a contested terrain over which many factions of the population struggled. In this way, French political singing was imbued with republican values from the very start.
Revolutionary song culture proliferated among all classes of French society, taking root in the burgeoning theater culture that emerged in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. At street theaters designated for lower classes, singers made their performances increasingly relevant to political affairs, emphasizing a set of suggestive lyrics or adding a new, highly charged verse. Because the Comédie Française enjoyed a monopoly on the spoken word, songs allowed performers to circumvent the ban on spoken dialogue and comment directly on the political climate. One critic, for example, reported that a frequently performed play had been amended to include "verses about the federation, which were enthusiastically applauded and an encore was demanded." Even the Opéra, the elite institution so thoroughly connected to the monarchy during the old regime, used song to promulgate the nation's new republican principles. Librettists wrote new lyrics that celebrated ancient democracies in Greece and Rome, and composers expanded the role of the chorus to mirror the new commitment to honoring the collective will of the people. By these means, the Opéra transformed itself, as one group of musicians wrote to the Committee of Public Safety, into "a school of patriotism" where "all those generous and republican passions" could be aroused.
After the fall of the monarchy, the new republican government quickly recognized music's value to the project of nation-building. They made songs and anthems a regular feature of the national festivals, the secular celebrations of republicanism that replaced Catholic festivals. Hiring musicians from the Opéra to perform refined pieces, and commissioning composers to write simple songs that the public could learn easily, festival organizers deployed music as a tool to construct the meaning of republicanism for a populace in transition. Not only were songs important for the content that they could transmit, but their sound, leaders hoped, could distill republican ideology in musical form. A uniquely French, republican style of music would communicate the nation's values, strength, and power not just to French people, but to the rest of the world. In a letter to the National Convention, Marie-Joseph Chénier summarized these arguments in the hopes of creating a national conservatory:
Therefore, if this art [of music] is useful, if it is moral, and moreover if it is necessary to the armies, to the national festivals and, in the broadest sense, to the splendor of the republic, make haste, Representatives, to assure it a safe haven ... Germany and vainglorious Italy, vanquished in all other arts by France, but long a victor in this genre alone, have at last met a rival.
For Chénier, the government could hardly afford to ignore the musical education of its citizens. Music, he believed, would spur French troops to imperial conquests, build public support for the new republican government, and establish France as a cultural leader on the world stage.
Yet, French citizens were not merely passive recipients of the songs they heard at the theater or local festival. At the Opéra and the street theaters, citizens interacted with the music they heard, interrupting singers to express their views on current affairs with applause, hisses, or demands for encores. During one performance of Henry IV's Supper, for example, a group of market women took to the stage in order to join the cast in the celebration of the king. "These ladies sang and drank to the health of the king, whom they kissed in the person of the actor portraying Henry," reported one witness. A year later, one newspaper reported that audiences on the other end of the political spectrum took over the singing of one "well-known song," transforming the musician on stage into a cantor who "serves only to strike up the song before his voice is covered by that of the entire audience." Individual citizens incorporated songs into their daily lives, singing "La Marseillaise" and "Ça Ira" — even musical versions of the constitution — together at cafés, on the streets, and in their homes. The content varied as widely as the political factions, but the act of communal singing reinforced enthusiasm for the central tenets of republican ideology: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Easy to memorize, songs could travel without leaving a paper trail, empowering people to voice seditious or unpopular opinions in relative safety. Easily composed, inexpensively printed, and easy to learn by ear, they offered even the low bred and illiterate access to the public sphere. Finally, because songs were performed communally, they allowed citizens to enact the concept of fraternity, that "necessary counterweight to republican equality," that protected the common good against unbridled individualism. In sum, singing with one's countrymen allowed French people to enact their commitment to one another, all while affirming their own equal positions as free individuals.
After the Revolution, the French continued to look to singing as a way to participate in public life. As France struggled to stabilize, songs allowed citizens to interpret events around them and make arguments against the policies of their government. In 1850, for example, a locksmith named Demoulin wrote "subversive" songs that he and his fellow workmen sang in taverns until their arrest:
The National Guard Are a lot of petticoats They've marched through the mountains And they've stolen all the grain.
Because most French remained illiterate during the nineteenth century, songs continued to serve as a means by which people could voice discontent. French people adapted well-known melodies to their own purposes, setting new lyrics to popular tunes that could be easily memorized and performed. The ease with which songs could be taught and learned made them an ideal medium for the formation of national identity. Indeed, it was through songs that rural citizens learned what it meant to be "French" and were assimilated into the modern nation. While songs such as "La Marseillaise" encouraged the spread of the national language, others were mobilized as part of a national education campaign designed to teach "a sense of the fatherland, of civilization, and of moral ideals." In this way, the construction of national identity was accompanied by a tradition of singing. Through their songs, French people reflected upon and built their notions of what it meant to be French.
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Excerpted from "Strains Of Dissent"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Kelly Jakes.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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