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Brett Bowles, Résistance oblige? Historiography, Memory, and the Evolution of Le Silence de la mer, 1942-2012
Among the best-selling French literary works of the twentieth century, Vercors' novella has enjoyed an exceptionally rich afterlife thanks to numerous print editions as well as several influential stage and screen adaptations: Jean-Pierre Melville's 1947 feature film, Jean Mercure's 1949 play, Vercors' own 1978 theatrical rendering, and a 2004 television movie written by Anne Giafferi and directed by Pierre Boutron. Taking a comparative approach that weighs the aesthetic and ideological priorities of these authors and directors alongside shifts in historiography and French political culture, this article traces the evolution of Le Silence de la mer as a contested site of national memory and a means of negotiating the ethically-charged concepts of collaboration and resistance.
Keywords: Vercors, Collaboration, World War II, Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Mercure
Written in mid-1941 by then-obscure illustrator Jean Bruller (1902-1991) under the pseudonym "Vercors" and published clandestinely in February 1942 by Les Éditions de Minuit, Le Silence de la mer is one of the earliest and most influential representations of French-German relations during the Second World War. In its first twenty years alone the novella sold 790,000 copies in France, making it one of the most successful publications of the century.1 By 1999 more than seventy editions had appeared in sixty different languages and the book had become a staple of reading lists in both French lycées and a range of French-language schools abroad, sometimes even appearing as a topic for the baccalauréat exam.2 Today, the story of an old man and his niece who feel sympathy for, but strive to avoid interacting with, Werner von Ebrennac, a cultured and sincerely Francophile Wehrmacht captain billeted in their home, is regarded as the quintessential expression of humanistic French patri- otism and non-violent civilian resistance to German belligerence in the tradi- tion of Alphonse Daudet's "La dernière classe" (1873).
During the war, however, Le Silence de la mer was considered an ideologi- cally polysemic and problematic text because of a fundamental paradox: after initially coding silence as a resolute form of resistance-the only one available to his French protagonists-Bruller reveals its inherently fragile and unsus- tainable nature by having both the uncle and niece speak to Von...