Abstract
Exceptional clarity in the writing and an impressively wide range of sources make it clear from the outset that the author is not writing an exhaustive history of any one of her three titles, but an original interweaving of all three, achieved with acute insight and arresting detail throughout.
Its timespan is much wider than the four years of Occupied France. Its first guiding date is 8 December 2014 when the French contracted with the USA to pay a substantial sum to victims of the Holocaust in the USA for the role of the state railway company, the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (SNCF) in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish men, women and children from all parts of France. The bitter substance of the contract was in stark contrast to the iconography of sabotage and derailments which had made the story of the railways under the German Occupation into almost a shorthand for the history of Resistance. This original study by Broch is a brilliant argument against both hagiography and recrimination.
To get to the French payment of 2014, we are taken back exactly 200 years to the beginning of the French railway network as proposed to Napoleon in 1814. From there, Broch develops the theme of a proud and studied professionalism within the railway community and its self-consciousness as a national body and military necessity in times of crisis. After the catastrophic defeat of France in 1940 the evidence presented here shows that the SNCF was integral to the relative rebuilding of the shattered nation in the first year of the Vichy regime. After the Armistice a large percentage of the railway workers taken as prisoners of war, returned by negotiation to France. The network, crippled by German bombing, was swiftly repaired and the SNCF was not unsympathetic to the rhetoric of a National Revolution headlined by Vichy and personalised in the widespread exaltation of its leader Marshal Philippe Pétain.
At this point in the story, the diffuse range of Broch’s research becomes ever more apparent. She is presenting us not just with a national company but with its workforce, and not just a unionized workforce but, wherever possible, individual workers. The question of how far the SNCF was involved in Vichy’s attempt to replace the syndicalist and communist ideologies of class struggle with its own paternalist structures, reveals just how pivotal railway workers were with their own sense of special status. This had kept them out of the strikes of the Popular Front in 1936, and yet nurtured significant individual and collective resistance to unacceptable authority.
The relativity of positions among the cheminots in the social life and politics of the Occupation is developed in richly researched thematic chapters, in which excellent new empirical material on theft, protest, sabotage and strikes is evaluated alongside theoretical studies of subaltern subversion, making a major contribution to French labour history. The author navigates skilfully between agency and structure, the individual and the collective, showing how they interacted throughout. Her meticulous summaries are models of layered thinking and awareness. Biographical excursions into named individuals are compulsive reading. The pages given to Henri Lang and Léon Brochart are particularly memorable.
As the book moves resolutely into the Holocaust issues which led to the French payment of 2014, its scholarly review of the controversies which occasioned and followed the settlement is impressive. Broch has already proved herself a judicious expert in these issues through her research articles, but she pays homage to the long-respected wisdom of Hilberg, Klarsfeld, Marrus and Paxton and to the recent work of Bachelier, Chevandier, Ribeill and many others. She finds no evidence of any initiative in the deportations, but empirically demonstrates how the SNCF had followed instructions, issued by Germans and Vichy, thus making it a ‘cog in the wheel’ of the Final Solution. The question of how knowing or unknowing the company and workers were about the murderous destination of the convoys is carefully considered.
The theme of professionalism as the long-term key to understanding the lives and choices of railway workers during the Occupation surfaces at all points in this thorough and perceptive study. So too does the ambiguity of a professional code when it is challenged by wider considerations whether political or ethical. Keeping cheminots at their jobs was favoured by the Resistance. Station officials, engine drivers and factory workers, were ideally placed to improvise or cover resistance actions, particularly at local level. In the coda of the book, the legendary valour of cheminot resistance as choreographed by René Clément in the 1945 film la Bataille du Rail, sits side by side with the accusations that the SNCF had never acknowledged that it had ‘taken part – and profited from – one of the most renowned crimes in all of history’. The tension in this juxtaposition had been palpable for decades, when a resolution was attempted by Guillaume Pepy, Chairman of the SNCF, in two speeches in America and France in 2010–11. He issued an unprecedented apology for the company’s role in the Holocaust, but honoured the memory of those cheminots ‘who paid with their lives for their insubordination, their resistance to the Nazi occupier and its Vichy collaborators’ (p. 235).
Dialectical opposites do not necessarily result in a synthesis, more often in a displacement, or, in this case, a re-placement. Broch does not end with Pepy, but with her own reminder of the book’s insistent location of the cheminots’ story in the complexities of working lives throughout the Occupation. This is riveting history from both above and below.