by
Sandy Flitterman-Lewis
“ The
basis of Jewish social life is the family,
and the Talmud is ever watchful to conserve
[its] stability. Recognizing
the all-important place which woman occupies
in the life of the family, it accords her
a most dignified position. Especially
when her lot among the other contemporary
peoples is taken into account, the honor
paid to woman by the Talmud offers a striking
contrast. In
no way is she looked upon as a being inferior
to man. Her
sphere of activity is different from man’s,
but of no less significance to the welfare
of the community.”
-Everyman’s
Talmud: The Teachings of the Rabbinic Sages (1949)
“Jakubowicz,
speaking for the plaintiffs [in the trial
of Frenchman Paul Touvier for crimes against
humanity], carefully enumerated the activities
a Jew could not fully engage in, the relaxation
he could not enjoy, the places he could
not go, the things he could not own. Forbidden
were the metros, the cinemas, schools,
public functions, the army, sports competitions,
camping, [restaurants, cafés, libraries,
museums, public parks, even phone booths],
and so on. The
lawyer insisted that all the heartaches
and humiliations be named and that the
jury members and the court learn, or remember,
that Jewish children could not play freely
in the public squares with other children. That they were forbidden to get dirty
in the same sandpile or laugh at the same
puppets.” --Libération 29
March 1994
“But
if the trials [of Vichy officials] do not
take place, research and education will
accomplish the task of the courts, especially
since so many French historians are now
working on the Vichy period. Thus
progress will be made and new questions
will be asked. History is never finished.
--Robert
Paxton, to Annette Lévy-Willard, 16
July 1992
“A
few more voices, a few more stories, and
this oral history of the Holocaust will
end, leaving the world with the memory
of all the courageous old men and women
who have come to Lyon on an impossible
pilgrimage. They will soon die. But their memory will remain, and their
voices will echo from generation to generation...
.” -
Annette Kahn, June 5, 1987, Why My Father
Died (1991)
Early
one spring morning in 1944--April 6, to be
exact--as the mountain streams were beginning
their life-affirming thaw, forty-five children
sat down to breakfast at La Maison d’Izieu, their temporary
home situated in a tiny village in the hills
overlooking the valley of the Rhône. An
important day in the Christian calendar,
this Maundy Thursday’s commemoration
of Christ’s Last Supper went unnoticed
amid the laughter and chatter and clanking
of porringers, for these were Jewish children
whose families had sought their safe haven
in the embracing protection of French provincial
life. That
particular morning, the founder and director
of the children’s colony, Sabine Zlatin
(otherwise known as “la Dame d’Izieu”)
was visiting Montpellier in search of less
compromised shelter for her little charges,
as the local Gestapo had recently turned
more threatening.
Later
that day, or more precisely at 8:10 in the
evening, Klaus Barbie, chief of the Gestapo
in Lyon, telexed the Commander of the Security
Police and Security Service for France (to
the attention of the Office for Jewish Affairs): ”This
morning the Jewish children’s home ‘colonie
enfant’ in Izieu, Ain was cleaned out....Neither
cash nor other valuables could be secured. Transport to Drancy to follow on 4/7/44.” The
tiny subjects of this housecleaning ranged
in age from five to seventeen, with over
half of them between the ages of ten and
thirteen. In
one of history’s most ironic little
details, the one non-Jewish child in the
group was released to his cousin, only to
remain in adulthood forever perplexed as
to the reason for his freedom. Of
the eight counsellors who were with the children
that day (including Miron Zlatin, Sabine’s
husband), only one escaped--Léon Reifman,
a medical student on staff at Izieu (who,
when sought by the forced labor authorities,
was succeeded by his sister Judith, a doctor). A
providential leap from a second-story window
enabled him to witness the children’s
last moments in the home, to become a medical
doctor himself, and to testify as an associate
plaintiff on behalf of his family at the
1987 trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon. Only
one person taken in the raid survived; thus
it was that twenty-six year-old Léa
Feldblum returned to tell the world how the
children, who were last seen on the departing
trucks singing at the top of their
lungs, “Vous n’aurez pas l’Alsace et la Lorraine,” all
perished in Auschwitz.
This event, which has become the notorious
symbol of Occupation France’s “War
Against Children,” is bracketted by
two equally horrific instances of organized
infanticide. The first, a mere six months after Wansee,
where the Final Solution was determined and
implemented, is referred to simply as the
Vel d’Hiv, shorthand for the Winter
Cycling Stadium (le Vélodrome d’Hiver)
where nearly 13,000 Jewish men, women, and
children (the latter two comprising the bulk
of the captives) were held for days after
having been rounded up from their homes,
hiding places, and streets of Paris on July
16 and 17, 1942 in what was referred to by
its French coordinators as “Operation
Spring Wind,” and later, by historians,
as the “Massacre of the Innocents.” All but a scant 200 perished either on
the site, at the French transit camp at Drancy,
or in the inevitable deportations to Auschwitz. The
third instance occurred just as Paris was
about to be liberated when, between July
21 and 31, 1944, SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois
Brunner rounded up 250 Jewish children from
hospitals, youth homes, and orphanages and
sent them to be tortured and murdered in
the east; imminent defeat did not diminish
a savage lust for annihilation.
How
is it, then, that while 75% of France’s
Jews survived the war, a chillingly resounding silence met the daily brutal eradication
of almost twelve thousand French children
whose only crime was that they were Jewish? One
way to understand this acquiescence is to
analyze the formation of public consciousnes,
the realm of values and beliefs that historically
define a culture. A look at the popular culture of the
time, particularly the cinema, can shed some
light on the paradoxes and confusions of
national identity that enabled (at the very
least) an atmosphere of indifference to the
situation of French Jews during the Occupation. A potent mix of xenophobia, racism, misogyny
and antisemitism roiled just beneath the
surface of this exemplary modern democracy,
waiting for the perfect circumstantial trigger
to explode the unifying myth of French citizenship
into the complexities and ambiguities that
had quietly complicated it for 150 years.
Pierre Laborie’s concept of “collective
everyday thinking” is useful here; the ordinary daily experience of individuals
combines with deep-rooted forms of unconscious
and ideological symbolization to produce
the lived relations in which activities are
performed, events are responded to, and actions
understood.
Jewish
women and children experienced these contradictions
the most, often living at odds with the official
discourses of French social life while nevertheless
attempting to carve out a viable Jewish identity
that was compatible with the surrounding
culture. Thus
behind the public image of an unproblematic
national persona lie the hidden discourses
of the domestic, the familial, and the maternal
as well as the symbolic systems and representations
that form the texture of daily life, culture,
history, and collective memory. In
this vein, adding a category to the established
chronologies of French Occupation Culture
(Socio-political events, Arts & Letters,
Cinema), that of Jewish family life, has
the inevitable effect of highlighting the
largely undocumented world of mothers and
children, of family life (the practical world
of lived traditions), and of emotional challenges
at this point of historical crisis. And this,
in turn, will produce a better understanding
of one of the dominating and most problematic
legacies of World War II France--the creation
of a social climate (especially regarding
children) which was disturbingly hospitable
to the Nazi genocide.
THE
SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE: LE
VOILE BLEU
“Before
the Jews could be isolated and exterminated,
they had to be divested of the human qualities
that emancipation and liberalism proclaimed
they shared with other members of modern
societies. ...The rights of man, however
diffuse the concept, were also the rights
of Jews, so long as Jews were recognized
as men and women. This
is where the logic of the situation demanded
that the Jew be dehumanized. ...And the
didactic and exemplary process of isolation
and dehumanization was able to draw on
[a] whole treasury of prejudice and resentment....But
then, if the Jew was less than human--and
harmfully so, of course: a microbe or a
parasite--it was not enough to expel him
from society, from this country or that. One had to rid the world of him. The logical conclusion of his dehumanization
was his extermination.” --Eugen Weber, My
France: Politics, Culture, Myth (1991)
“The
Catholic church, far from calling for [the
Nazi genocide] to be forgotten, knows that
conscience is constituted by memory and
that no society, no individual, can be
at peace with himself if his past is repressed
or dishonest...The vast majority of church
officials, [in an atmosphere of] deep-rooted
antisemitism, adhered to an attitude of
excessive conformity, caution, and indifference
that permitted France to acquiesce to a
murderous process. ...They did not realize
that they had considerable power and influence,
and that given the silence of other institutions,
their statement could, through its echo,
have formed a barrier to the irreparable....In
the face of the persecution of Jews, especially
the multi-faceted antisemitic laws passed
by Vichy, silence was the rule, and words
in favor of the victims the exception. Today
we confess that silence was a mistake. We beg for the pardon of God and we ask
the Jewish people to hear this word of
repentance.” --Archbishop Olivier de Berranger
of St-Denis (for the Roman Catholic Church
of France), “Declaration of Repentance,” Drancy,
30 September
1997
“[Having
a specific homeland] will not resolve the
problem of Jewish peoplehood in its multiple
aspects: human, economic, political and
demographic. There can never be a national territory
for all the Jews in the world. And
yet, we must come to terms with this in
time, if we really are concerned with creating
a ‘Jewish people’ for whom
we can assure a free and normal existence. It’s right to say that in order
to create a State and recreate a nation,
we must have an ideal, a belief. But since when have the ideas of freedom,
of country, of the happiness of all people,
and of children, when has this not had
the force of an ideal, of a belief?...Here
we must have the courage to see clearly
and to think of the future, of eternity.” --Lévy-Coblentz,during
a discusscion group at Drancy, quoted
by Georges Wellers in Un Juif sous Vichy (1973/1991)
“In
contrast to literature, French theater
and fiction film [of the time] did not
have anything to do with relaying collaborationist
ideas, nor did they have a role in disseminating
Pétainist ideology. Film
and theater, in their totality, were purely
a means of escape.” --HenryRousso, Les années noires:
vivre sous l’Occupation (1992)
Released
in November of 1942, at the moment that all
of France had finally becomeoccupied
by the Nazis, the feature film Le Voile
bleu (The Blue Veil) by Jean Stelli
and François Campaux is relatively
unknown outside of its contemporary wartime
context. This
makes it what film historian Colin Crisp
calls a “forgotten film,” that
is, a film whose widespread popularity when
it was seen and discussed could not prevent
it from dropping out of what Crisp refers
to as the “common memory,” the
official and unofficial histories (both cinematic
and general) of France under the German Occupation. What makes this film paradigmatic
for Crisp is the fact that its commercial
and critical failure in urban venues contrasts
its overwhelming popularity in the provinces,
a popularity that allows the mere mention
of its title, even today, to immediately
evoke expressions of nostalgic reverie. One
need look no further for a practical definition
of the “people’s cinema.”
Dedicated
to “those heroic people who love and
care for the children of others,” and
who, “when they must leave them, love
them as if they were their very own,” Le
Voile bleu traces the lifelong vocation
of Louise Jarreau (top boxoffice star and “Pétainist
Muse” Gaby Morlay) who, having lost
her own infant son (relatively soon after
losing her husband in the Great War), dedicates
her life to the care and nurturing of other
people’s children. While
all of the parents are either too preoccupied,
too selfish, or too distant, Louise is a
maternal angel whose love and generosity
provide the fertile soil from which grow successful,
devoted, ethical adults--which is to say,
ideal French citizens of Vichy’s New
Moral Order. Redolent
with Catholic symbolism, this paean to true
Motherhood provided French audiences with
two enduring and unquestioned universals--maternal
love and childhood innocence--at a time when
the social community and material world were
filled with anguish. Traditional
interpretations cast this film as a warning
against bad parenting (seen as the cause
of the devastating defeat of 1940) or as
a mindless sob-fest (right-wing critic Lucien
Rebatet cynically called its emotional excesses “du
cinéma lacrymogène”),
while other readings focus on the purely
ideological or globally archetypal underpinnings
of this melodrama with a moral dimension.
French
film scholar Jacques Siclier points to this
film as an example of the power of popular
cinema, in part because of its great catalyzing
effect not only on French wartime audiences,
but on the very construction of cultural
identity itself: “With Le Voile
bleu Gaby Morlay became a national symbol,
the feminine figure par excellence in a moral order where
motherhood and its spirit of maternal sacrifice
and of devotion to the familial hearth were
exalted. Crowds
of weeping viewers were drawn to it, and
when its postwar exhibition shifted to television,
it had exactly the same effect. Witnessfilm of an era, Le Voile bleu...was
the greatest commercial success of French
Occupation cinema.” Though some dispute the accuracy
of this claim, no one disagrees about the
film’s vast popular appeal. It was an extremely moving and avidly
discussed expression of unproblematic truth
and unblemished virtue in a world that seemed
to offer the very opposite each day. And certainly on the surface of its simple
narrative about beneficence, Christian charity
and uncomplicated love, there is nothing
about which to be suspicious.
However,
if we look at this unequivocally popular
film from the perspective of Occupation culture’s “other,” an
alternative meaning emerges. The
Jew, and more specifically, Jewish families
(with their seasonal and life-cycle celebrations,
their emphasis on children’s lives,
and their sanctification of the home as a
place of worship) are nowhere to be seen
in the film’s many images of maternal
love and youthful devotion. Moreover,
this screen invisibility is matched by material
invisibility in daily life. According
to the statutes designed to isolate them
from the rest of French society, Jews were
forbidden from all public spaces (movie theaters
included) while, in what was left (such as
main thoroughfares), their visibility as different was accomplished by the Mogen David designation. It is my contention that, far more dangerous
than the obvious and easily rejected antisemitic
stereotypes of a certain kind of propaganda,
these unremarkable absences promoted
a generalized climate of indifference that
led easily to tacit acquiescence to genocide. Thus the lack of access to representation
that produced the symbolic denial of Jewish
reality on the screen facilitated actual
denial of Jewish lives first in French society
and then, to more devastating ends, in the
Nazi machine.
Le
Voile bleu is indeed a witness, but
it is also a kind of evidence. It
attests to a particular
ideology of Vichy’s National Revolution,
that of the family in both its lived relations and in its
fantasmatic social representations. The
New Order of Marshal Philippe Pétain
had replaced France’s traditional
democratic values of Freedom, Equality,
and Brotherhood with the nostalgic ideals
of a heroic, mythical Gallic past, tied
to the land and associated with the enduring
simplicity of universal verities: Work,
Family, Fatherland. Le Voile bleu, therefore, is a
kind of matrix for understanding antisemitism
in France, serving as an excellent example
of the way in which a popular (somewhat “artless”)
melodrama can convey the national ideology
at the deepest unconscious levels of the
self, where personal subjectivity and the
sense of (social) belonging intersect in
the construction of a nation’s “citizens.“ While
there has been significant work by historians
on more overt propaganda techniques of
the Vichy regime, what interests me here
is the subtle and invisible production
of social attitudes--public images that
shape personal action. Tragically, in the instance of Occupation
France, this enabled a significant portion
of a modern country--famous for its sophistication,
enlightenment, culture and democratic ideals--to
tolerate the intolerable, to think the
unthinkable, and then finally, to permit
the impossible to happen. Contrary
to Henry Rousso’s rather glib assertion,
just about any article of popular culture
of the time can be seen to “disseminate
Pétainist ideology,” but it
often does so in a complex and necessarily
oblique manner.
Thus
beneath its veil of innocent entertainment, Le
Voile bleu provides a fascinating Rosetta
Stone of Occupation culture. In
the guise of purveying the unquestioned universals
of unconditional maternal love and childhood
affection, the film masks the sinister betrayal
of these values by the legislated marginalization,
isolation, vilification and eventual annihilation
of Jewish life. Therefore,
an interpretation of this film through the
prism of Jewish children’s experience
of the Holocaust, for example, (from novel-memoirs
such as Sarah Kofman’s Rue Ordener,
Rue Labat or Renée Roth-Hano’s Touch
Wood: A Girlhood in Occupied France to
fictional reconstructions as in Louis Malle’s Au
Revoir les enfants or Claude Berri’s Le
Vieil homme et l’enfant to documentaries
such as Aviva Slesin’s Silent Lives or
Lisa Gossels and Dean Wetherell’s The
Children of Chabannes, and testimonies
such as Odette Meyers’s Doors to
Madame Marie or Vivette Samuel’s Rescuing
the Children) yields
a history that counters the official discourses
of the French family under the Occupation
or Vichy with the truths of lived experience,
amplifying the picture of family life in
France with the traces of a cultural language
almost totally banished by racial hatred. Central
to this complex duality of the family is
the opposition between the official Vichy
ideal of “authentic” Frenchness
and the debased and suspect otherness of the Jew. Considered, as well, in light of the
situation of hidden
children (the uniquely horrible and highly
specific tragedy experienced by thousands
of Jewish families trying to protect their
most vulnerable members from certain death), Le
Voile bleu unwittingly highlights the
fluid and ambiguous definitions of “self,” “childhood,” “mother,” “family,” and “home,” putting
into question--as did the Holocaust itself--the
very certainty of identity that these fundamental
and sustaining human notions imply.
The
production and release dates of Le Voile
bleu provide crucial support for my reading
of the film. Work on the film began in April of 1942,
a scant three months after Wannsee had determined
the procedures for eliminating
Jews in the occupied territories of the West. Vichy,
apparently anticipating the Nazi strategy
of allowing indigenous antisemitism to do
the dirty work, had already enacted its first
Statutes of the Jews in October of 1940. This
meant, in a very material way, that the audience
for the film would be devoid of Jews, as
they were forbidden from attending the cinema. It
also explains why the film could be so antisemitic
in its message without ever referencing Jewish
life on the screen. And, as previously noted, the film’s
release coincided with Germany’s invasion
of Pétain’s France, thereby
placing the entire country under Nazi rule. The
Nazi’s sense of irony is not absent:
the date of the Occupation of the Southern
Zone by the Germans and the Italians was
November 11, the date of the World War I
Armistice, and henceforth a day of remembrance
throughout France. That Le Voile bleu opens as war-widow
Louise gives birth can only be read as a
sign of the Great War’s hovering shadow,
as unfolding events are bathed in nostalgia
for France’s former glory while precise
references to the war itself are nonexistent.
However,
the most important date occurs in the middle of
the film’s production, for between
the start of filming in April and the film’s
release in November, the event that marks
the turning point in both the assault on
Jewish children and the desire to protect
them takes place--the Vel d’Hiv raid
of July 1942. This
is the first time
that Jewish women and children, instead of
their more immediately suspicious counterparts,
foreign Jewish men, were rounded up for deportation. In
some cases, men who were forewarned had already
hidden and the French police simply took
their families. In
other cases the sweep was general enough
to include all Jewish
persons, regardless of age. Tiny
infants, terrified toddlers and teenagers
alike were herded into the living hell of
the winter cycling stadium, only to be shoved
into trucks and boxcars at a later date. Thus it is at the exact
midpoint of Le Voile bleu’s
production history that a profound change
in French attitudes toward the Jews occurs.
Pierre Laborie notes that when people were
confronted with the material reality of antisemitism, “[t]he
population was shocked. The sight of convoys, the separations,
and especially the fate of the children provoked
considerable emotion....This changed significantly
the image of the Jew in its dominant representations: from a guilty and responsible abstraction,
the Jew was transformed into a real human
being, persecuted and victimized--a victim,
among others, of a collaboration hated a
little more for this as well.” Therefore, from this point on, the logic
of racial hatred required that the ideological
production of French antisemitism become
more covert. And,
from our perspective, a film like Le Voile
bleu was forced to adopt strategies of
indirection in order to hide its antisemitic
implications under a veil of universality
and received truths. In
the film, everything is done to neutralize
the particularity of each child; they are
simply representations of childhood itself,
while Louise is the protective maternal arm
of Vichy’s La Douce France and its
moral authority.
The
reality, however, for, Jewish children,
did not conform to such lofty abstractions,
and it was important that this truth be masked
in the film. Hidden from the popular audience of Le
Voile bleu, therefore, was the fate of
virtually thousands of children. After the Vel d’Hiv raid, every
Jewish child, French or foreign, was in danger;
beyond the arrest of entire families, random
separations of children from their parents
became commonplace. In a chillingly prescient
pamphlet in Yiddish, published and distributed
in early July, the activist group Solidarité warned
of imminent massive detentions: “Do
not wait passively in your homes for the
arrival of the bandits...Hide, and above
all, hide your children, with the help of
the non-Jewish population. From another perspective,
and from the distance of history, Judith
Elbaz writes a moving preface to her grandmother’s
memoir about working with the OSE (Oeuvre
de secours aux enfants /Society for Assitance
to Children), “I often ask my grandmother
whether it was courage or lack of awareness
that led her to voluntary internment in the
camp of Rivesaltes in 1941 as a nondeclared
Jew,...and to the cruel but saving certainty
of a single command--at any price separate
the children from their parents so that the
former might live.”
She
goes on to consider the fate of these hidden
children: “These
were children who had been removed from their
families, then collected, then again separated
from one another and hidden all over France,
and once more separated from their new families. How
did they get accustomed to changing circumstances? How
did they remake themselves with new identities,
always, everywhere?” To make matters even worse, protection
and rescue of Jewish children by non-Jews
was not always done for the purest motives;
there is substantial documentation to support
the claim that, in many cases, Jewish children
were seen as ideal Vichy subjects, once they
had been properly “adopted” or “converted.” This is borne out in a striking comparison
of two book covers for texts written half
a century after the war. Lucien Lazare’s La résistance
juive en France (translated, interestingly,
as Rescue as Resistance) documents
specifically Jewish resistance in France,
from sheltering children to blowing up trains,
in order to show how their task was different--they
were concerned with saving as many Jews as
possible from annihilation by the Nazis. The book’s premise, that rescue--a
category that includes such activities as
smuggling Jews across borders, fabricating
false papers, or hiding children--was a genuinely
significant way of fighting back, is powerfully
illustrated by its cover. The
image is of a group of bundled children,
each with belongings in a bag slung over
their shoulders, addressing the camera with
expressions of youthful bravado that barely
hide the apprehension across their faces. These are the children from the orphanage
Beiss Yessoinim in La Varenne Saint-Hilaire,
near Paris, leaving in secret in the early
hours of March 4, 1943, to be placed with
non-Jewish families in the countryside.
Maurice
Rajsfus’ N’oublie pas le petit
Jésus discusses the role of the
Catholic church in the protection of Jewish
children, revealing how in many cases the
right wing ideology of Pétain’s
National Revolution guided the “soul-saving” operations
of many of its rescuers: The June 8, 1940
issue of La Croix could triumphantly
proclaim “We will come to recognize
that our victory is that of Jesus’s
heart, and that he reigns over every household.” The cover photograph shows a ragged
bunch of children looking up toward the authoritative
figure of the priest, hands clasped in prayer,
while to the right of the group sits a grandmotherly-looking
nun, whose ample lap promises the comfort
that these tiny children seem to crave. It
is in this context of the disturbingly powerful
contradictions experienced by Jewish children
in France that Louise Jarreau’s efforts
to nurture neglected children in Le Voile
bleu take on a much more sinister meaning
and earn the film its status as cinematic
prop not only of Vichy ideology, but of its
antisemitic underpinnings as well.
The
basic plot of this very popular melodrama
is fairly simple. Since
the film is not easily available and no subtitled
version exists, a short breakdown of the
action is necessary. Louise Jarreau gives birth to a
baby boy who dies almost immediately; because
her husband has been killed in the Great
War, she is left to her own resources. Since
she loves children, work as a governess seems
logical. Her pathway to redemption and canonization
leads her to ever more intense relationships
with the children in her care until she “adopts” a
young boy and has difficulty returning him
to his parents (who have found work in Indochina
and remained there for a long time). Her life crumbles, and just when one
thinks she can suffer no longer--she has
a bad fall and is “saved” by
the now adult doctor who had been one of
her early charges. The
film’s key moments are those of Catholic
rituals, so it is fitting that Louise receive
some “new” little ones to care
for as the Christmas decorations leave no
doubt that she is truly the Madonna of Vichy.
Gaby
Morlay occupies nearly every frame of the
film, making the blue veil that she wears
as governess synonymous with a certain conception
of Vichy’s eternal feminine. As Noel Burch and Geneviève Sellier
point out, “Nun or ‘lay sister’...this
female type renounces all personal happiness
in order to restore order to a society marked,
according to Catholic traditionalism, by
all of the shortcomings of the Third Republic:
hedonism, parental irresponsibility, adultery,
greed, selfishness, personal ambition, etc.
...More avenging than charitable, the figure
of Gaby Morlay fights to restore the values
of a temporarily failed patriarchy (due to
the Defeat), and brings every one into line
by a kind of inflexible meekness. Incarnation of Judeo-Christian guilt,
she arrives at her goal by camouflaging indomitable
authority with a deceptive submissiveness. The
nurse’s blue veil or the nun’s
white-winged cap, like the cape of the standard-bearer,
all render her untouchable: universal mother,
having renounced the baseness of an earthly
maternity, she corresponds to the Marshall
himself, childless, who draws from Verdun
his paternal dignity which he extends over
all of France.” Such a powerful figure of moral regeneration
most surely stands alone, but for purposes
of the narrative she is flanked by two foils,
an impetuous diva (Elvire Popesco) who has
no time for her adorable young daughter and
a pathetically heartsick and ineffectual
toystore owner (character actor Larquey),
whose efforts to woo Louise must forever
remain in the ether of fantasy. A
brief outline of the sequencing is as follows:
1. Louise delivers then loses her infant. Despondant and without purpose, she is
advised to seek work by the hospital’s
counselor.
2. Baby #1: Frederic Perrette. At a toy store run by Antoine Lancelot,
Louise has the first of several, increasingly
friendly encounters with the man who will
become the imaginary father in a “family” consisting
of Louise and a child...
3. Child #2: Gerard Volnard-Bussel. This nouveau-riche couple and their nasty
older kids make Louise cling to the child
with whom she develops a bond. The kids plot. Louise leaves with a broken heart, forced
to abandon the first little boy whom she
has grown to love as her own.
4. Child #3. A
young girl, Charlotte, is the daughter of
famous choreographer Mona Lorenzo. At
Charlotte’s first communion, Louise
realizes the girl is closer to her than to
her own mother. She leaves, firmly telling Charlotte
that she can never take the place of her
own mother.
5. Child #4. Daniel
Forneret. This
boy’s parents must leave him in France
(for health reasons) while the father seeks
work in Incochina. After
telling the mother that she could never leave
her own son, were she to have one, she volunteers
to keep Daniel and ends up raising him for
a period of years. When she learns of his parents’ return
with their claim of their son, Louise takes
him to England, where she is pursued by the
police. Family
friend Lancelot dies of a broken heart and
Louise must give the boy back to his parents. The French police assure Louise that
she has the moral authority to keep the boy,
but the law says he must be returned. The police deal contemptuously with Daniel’s
parents, who are pained to see their own
son’s rejection of them.
6. Child #5. Philippe
Breuilly. A
demoralized Louise finds work at a wealthy
household where the imperious grandmother
torments her. Louise
tames the unruly boy who then leaves for
boarding school. Louise
falls down the stairs and lands in the hospital.
7. At the hospital, Louise tells her kind
young doctor (the now adult and quickly recognized)
Gerard Volnard-Bussel, about her love of
children and the photo album she keeps. She
leaves the hospital, sits alone in a park,
is shooed away from the little girl she stoops
to attend, returns to her excruciatingly
modest home. Gerard
invites her over, telling her he has a surprise
for her. When
she arrives, Louise finds all her little
charges now grown and she is presented with
the next generation of little children to
care for. Louise is thereby redeemed in a ceremony
that restores her blue veil just as it restores
dignity to the Fatherland....And it’s
Christmas!!! Burch
and Sellier describe as follows: “The
last shot of Le Voile bleu, reuniting
the new ranks of a regenerated society around
a Christmas tree in order to honor their
old governess, evokes the Vichyist posters
that portray young people gathered around
the Marshall, and further suggests the religious
iconography of Christ and of the Virgin presiding
over the blissful community of the blessed.”
Two
examples from the film, one diachronic and
the other synchronic, illustrate to what
extent the denial of a child-centered universe
lends support to the film’s dual message
of ideological regeneration and antisemitic
exclusion. In Le
Voile bleu children are commodities to
be exchanged and bartered by adults, the
vehicles by which the superior mothering
skills of Louise are demonstrated. Mona
Lorenzo must prove she has the emotional
currency to “win” her child back,
while little Daniel Forneret is the coveted
object whose “repossession” by
his parents triggers the film’s climax. Family
discourse involves terms of ownership, and
within the National Revolution, responsible
or neglectful parenting determines the success
or failure of the State. In
this context, the varied examples of parental
deficiency that Louise must address constitute
a veritable lesson in Vichy subject-formation
at the same time that they represent those
qualities attributed to France’s enemies,
namely “foreign” Jews who are
always considered “inassimilable” to
the hegemonic social body. Four of the five unworthy parents conform
to some version of antisemitic stereotypes--the
businessman, the nouveau-riche, the show-business
performer, and the couple forced to leave
France. Yet their offspring, nourished by Louise’s
care, mature into those professions also
considered to be dominated by Jews (until
the antisemitic laws prohibited their participation)--doctors,
lawyers, soldiers, artists, entertainers,
teachers, engineers. In other words, the film can be seen
as a melodrama of Aryanization in which “Jewish” children
are turned into authentic French citizens
whose assumption of professional status hinges
on the absolute negation of any trace of
otherness. Maternal
care is thus the lynchpin of Vichy social
production.
The
synchronic textual manifestation of this
process involves a five-minute sequence in the police-magistrate’s office
where, in the presence of Louise, Daniel’s
parents retrieve their son.
The
scene opens with a file marked “Affaire
Louise Jarreau,” and ends with a screaming
boy (“Je ne veux pas, JE NE VEUX PAS!”)
being led away while the despondent governess
sinks into the arms of the caring magistrate,
then is gently coaxed out the door and into
a universe of isolation. There is a telling dynamic to this scene--an
antisemitic subtext to this drama without
Jews--giving a chillingly prescient foretaste
of a scenario repeated ceaselessly in the
ensuing postwar years, as countless relatives
returning from Auschwitz or other infernos
sought to be reunited with those surviving
children hidden for safekeeping, only to
find their claims to these family-members
overturned by French courts in favor of the
adoptive custodians with whom, sadly, the
children preferred
to remain. The
principles occupy the symbolic positions
of Vichy authority, the debased and exiled
Jew, la
Mère chrétienne, and the “battleground” of
imperilled youth. The
Fornerets have come back from Indochina to
claim the three-year-old (now Bar Mitzvah
age) whom they’ve left in Louise’s
care. As mentioned, Louise’s reaction
to the news is to abscond with the boy, her
surrogate son, until the police track her
down. Daniel
thus becomes a youthful pawn, defined only
as a “son” rather than part of
a family (of brothers and sisters, mother
and father), “belonging” to Louise
and now being “returned” to a
strange and distant couple.
There
is something unsettling in the way that the
magistrate treats the Fornerets, a disturbing
contrast to the kind indulgence with which
he addresses Louise. (The
viewer has already been primed for this condemnatory
attitude by Lancelot’s passionate defense
to the police inspector before his collapse: “The
boy had been abandoned by unworthy, shameful
parents and Louise took it upon herself to
take his mother’s place. She
treated him like a son, and for this she
deserves to keep him!”) Here in his office the magistrate now
refers dismissively to “this unhappy
little business” while angrily scolding
Monsieur Forneret: “Enough!” (He
suddenly bangs the desk.) “You have
the law on your side, as monstrous as that
might seem, and I deplore it.” As
the camera moves to frame his righteously
indignant face, the parents seen only from
the back, he shouts: “I
don’t even know if an abduction has
been involved. Rather,
I would say it is child abandonment.” Madame
Forneret says timidly, “There are reasons
for our actions,” to which the judge
responds, “I have no time for your
excuses.” He raises his punitive pencil, addressing
the father, “Don’t you use that
tone with me!” And,
after gently apologizing to Louise that he
is powerless to intervene, he shouts at the
Fornerets, “Leave! Get
out! Quick!” And this they do, as they usher the crying
boy away. All
of this is punctuated by beatific soft-focus
large closeups of Louise (the only ones until
the very end of the film) as she explains
how her love for Daniel entitles her to continue
her maternal role. Audience
identification thus successfully mobilized
for Vichyist values, the delinquent parties
expunged, we can only await the restoration
of moral order at the film’s end, when
the adult Daniel is “returned” to
Louise, a successful engineer amid his equally
successful compatriots, ready to bless her
with the return of her beloved blue veil
and new French citizens to cherish and mold.
SUFFER
THE LITTLE CHILDREN: THE VICHY CHILD, JEWISH
BOYS AND GIRLS, LA DAME D’IZIEU
“By a play of words the thought is expressed
that children (banim) are builders
(bonim); they not only build the
future of the family but likewise of the
community....[C]hildren were thought of
as a precious loan from God to be guarded
with loving and faithful care.” --Everyman’s
Talmud
“Between August 17 and 31 [1942], seven trains
left Drancy for Auschwitz carrying about
1,000 people each. Between one-third and one-half of the
passengers in each train were unaccompanied
children....The scene inside those overcrowded
cars can scarcely be imagined. The
lack of light alone was enough to cause
panic among toddlers still afraid of the
dark....Brothers and sisters were often
separated, and babies as young as two or
three found themselves totally alone. In theory, each car contained from one
to ten adults, usually women, to reassure
forty, sixty, and in some cases, over ninety
terrified youngsters. In
such circumstances, reassurance was not
possible.”
-
Susan Zuccotti, The
Holocaust, The French, and The Jews (1993)
“Buses arrive. We remove children in unimaginable condition. A
cloud of insects surrounds them, and a
terrible stench....We will never forget
the faces of those children; endlessly
they pass before my eyes. They
are serious, profound, and, what is extraordinary:
in these little faces, the horror of the
days which they are living is branded....They
show us their most precious belongings:
the pictures of their mothers and fathers
which their mothers gave them when they
parted. Hastily
the mothers wrote a tender inscription. We all have tears in our eyes; we imagine
that tragic instant, the immense pain of
the mothers.”
-
Memoir of Odette Daltroff-Baticle, adult
internee at Drancy in 1942 (Written in 1943,
given to
Serge Klarsfeld in 1977, published in books
by different authors in 1983, 1985, 1991, 1993,
1996)
“Rachel’s mother lit the candles and
said the special prayer. ...’The
soul is the Lord’s candle,’ Papa
would always say, then smiling, ‘That’s
in the Talmud.’ Rachel loved the
holy feeling of this moment. ...She would
always carry this picture in her heart,
no matter what happened when she was grown
up.” [And later, as she and Papa
contemplate the night sky...] “Something
made him pause. He
looked down at his daughter and stroked
her hair. ‘God is like a star inside you,’ he
said softly. ‘A
still, small flame. When you are afraid, or cold, or lonely,
remember that you have a secret star inside,
and you will know that God is there.’ You
must remember, Rachel. It
is a place that no one else can touch.’ And
then he added with a smile,’You are
the only little Ruchella that God
made. The
only one.’” -
Sharon Flitterman-King, A Secret Star (1987)
In
his twenty-year labor of love and conscience
entitled French Children of the Holocaust:
A Memorial, Serge Klarsfeld offers disturbing
yet detailed documentation of France’s
war against children. While
other countries such as England and Denmark
were arranging to transport their little
ones to safety, France efficiently deported
no fewer than 11,402 Jewish boys and girls
under the age of eighteen to the east, where
