Occupation and resistance: In honour of Margaret Atack

Introduction

Margaret Atack was an original thinker and a scrupulously thorough scholar whose research had significant impact over several key sub-fields of contemporary French Studies. These include, notably: the experience and effects of the German Occupation of France during the Second World War; May 1968 and its representations in novels and films; crime fiction; feminist theory and literature. In each of these domains she leaves a legacy of deeply researched and finely argued publications. Equally significant was her impact on generations of students, for she was also an inspiring teacher.

In this volume we edit in her honour – a volume that began life as a commemorative symposium held at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies in October 2024 – we focus on Margaret's now renowned work on the Occupation years, and the ways in which these have been represented and remembered. Margaret's work challenged dominant views of what resistance meant, in the France of 1940–1945, and of how the Occupation years had been interpreted in the postwar period. In her first, highly influential book Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940–1950 (Manchester University Press, 1989), based on her doctoral thesis, she disputed the commonly held view that the heroic myth of France as a nation of resisters had silenced other versions of events up until the appearance of controversial films and historical studies in the 1970s. Her work on published, if in many cases little known, texts of the war and immediate postwar years showed conclusively that the moral and political ambiguities of those years were already part of the discursive landscape. She brought to light the crucial importance of literary representation, and especially of narrative, for both the understanding and the retrospective construction of lived experience, emphasising literary form rather than reading texts as mere reflections of the time, and substantially extending the archive of ‘Resistance literature’. This work continued and developed with the 2006 award of a large AHRC grant for the FRAME (FRAnce, Roman, gueRre) project she co-led with Christopher Lloyd, which led to the production of a substantial database of the still expanding body of novels and other literary work relating to the Occupation years, as well as to an edited book (Framing Narratives of the Second World War and Occupation in France 1939–2009: New Readings, ed. M. Atack and C, Lloyd, Manchester University Press, 2012), numerous articles and chapters, and a Special issue of French Cultural Studies (Vol 22: 3, August 2011).

In 2018 Margaret contributed an essay to Manuel Bragança and Fransiska Louwagie's edited book Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), in which she reflected on the intellectual and personal trajectories that led her to choose her particular fields of research. It is a moving and telling piece of writing, resonant with overlapping memories, especially for those of her own generation. The intellectual training provided by a traditional French degree programme in the late 1960s (for there were already exceptions) was both helpfully rigorous in terms of analytical skills and knowledge of the historical canon of French literature and philosophy, and singularly ill-suited to tackling the complex relationships between history, politics and representation. Margaret recalls the thrill of May ‘68 with its vibrant mix of contestation and cultural invention, and the subsequent (to an extent contemporaneous) explosion of ‘French theory’ that swept through English departments, and eventually French ones too, in British universities. Here, as she embarked on her PhD studies at University College London in 1971 (the very year that Le Chagrin et la Pitié came out and was shown on BBC2 if not on French TV) she gradually discovered the beginnings of theoretical support for that ‘vision of the literary as the expression of a cultural politics’ (p. 116) that would be the hallmark of her work.

With the thesis still unfinished as, with characteristic rigour, she grappled with the wealth of emerging scholarship and theory to formulate a coherent methodology on which to ground her study, in 1979 Margaret arrived for the first time at Leeds, on a one-year lectureship. There, among the wonders of the Brotherton library, she discovered a full set of the Lettres françaises clandestines, still protected by copyright from more than a minimum of photocopying. So she copied all 19 issues out by hand, and recalls the sense of conducting a ‘detailed, intimate conversation’ (p. 119) with their authors that this provided. Her ‘ego-histoire’, she reflects, was also shaped by personal history; for a generation born in the aftermath of World War 2, that war was a constant, if at the time scarcely perceived, presence, in the memories of parents and grandparents, in the material traces of air-raid shelters and bombed ruins, in films and books, so that studying that period brought ‘recognition as well as discovery’ (p. 112). And France too, for a family like Margaret's, was always there, for holidays, through French lessons at school – and for those of us brought up Catholic (one of the formative elements shared with a surprising number of colleagues in French Studies, including one of the editors of this volume), that odd sensation of sometimes being more at home in Catholic France, for example in a French church with the familiarity of the Latin mass, than in Anglican England where Margaret was once insulted to hear Catholicism being described as a ‘sub-culture’. Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined communities’ are also divided communities, and Margaret's work would always explore national identity as an intricately complex notion. ‘Englishness and Frenchness are both separate and inseparable for me’ (p.113), she writes.

The book of the thesis was published in 1989, the year before Margaret co-edited (with Phil Powrie) a groundbreaking volume of essays on French women writers: Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 1990). More central to our focus here is the 2006 FRAME project, which built on Margaret's earlier research by making visible the huge corpus of imaginative work that bears witness to, explores and incrementally reshapes and adapts the meanings of those traumatic years. Crucially, it continued the work of drawing attention to lesser-heard voices, both of the Resistance itself, and of those who have written about the Occupation, notably women, but also other ‘minorities’ including colonial and postcolonial writers. Here the work on the war years overlapped productively with other aspects of her research career: Margaret consistently emphasised the political and social significance of literary and filmic representations, and their power to shape collective memory, social attitudes and competing constructions of experience. This would be an important dimension of her work on May 1968, and the Occupation scholarship also pays due attention to the popular genre of crime fiction, resituates forgotten women-authored texts in a male-dominated canon, expands the narrow definition of ‘French’ to include writers whose relationship to the French language is the result of colonial domination – all of these consistent features of Margaret's wide-ranging research.

The principal aim here, then, is to pay tribute to Margaret Atack's inspirational work on a vital period of French history and its ongoing legacy. The articles below are all written by scholars inspired, in a variety of ways, by her work, whether as her contemporaries engaged in related research fields, as colleagues, or as her students who have gone on to become distinguished academics. Mike Kelly picks up one of Margaret's guiding themes of unity and ambiguity, respectively characteristic of Resistance and postwar fiction, to study the difficult negotiation of progressive Catholic values against the ethical ambiguities of those years in Emmanuel Mounier's review Esprit. Claire Gorrara takes inspiration from Margaret's work on women's role in the Resistance and her emphasis on literary form, as opposed to reading committed texts as essentially reflections of their situation. Claire examines the work of Edith Thomas, Resistance writer and historian, pursuing her study into Thomas's postwar career and the transhistorical impact of her wartime experience. Hilary Footitt illuminates the significance of Margaret's work within the context of 1970s and 80s historiography of the Resistance, notably her vital expansion of the archive of Resistance writing. Hilary's article emphasises the continuation of this work today and the significant possibilities offered for archival research by increasingly sophisticated digital technologies. Debra Kelly too echoes Margaret's persistent attention to unheard voices, especially those of women, and the importance of their creative responses to wartime experience that was indisputably gendered. She examines the fragmentary, dispersed témoignages left by French women resident in wartime London, thus considering the experience and the voices of ‘ordinary people’ in a most extraordinary situation. Ruth Cruickshank also expands understanding of what those years meant and of their complex legacy with a focus on the importance of food, or the lack of it, for the occupied French population. She examines the literary legacy of food deprivation in the hitherto overlooked thematic centrality of disordered eating in the narrative fiction of Elsa Triolet. David Platten takes one of the postwar novels that Margaret considered seminal to an understanding of postwar trauma: Camus’ La Chute. In his reading of the novel, he pursues Margaret's always curious, intellectually open interest in developments in literary theory, to apply the perspectives of neuroscience to a novel that deals with some of the issues at the heart of Margaret's work: existentialism, relations between self and other, and the lasting effects of personally and collectively traumatic experience.

It is no surprise that Margaret was an early and a loyal contributor to the journal in which this tribute appears, French Cultural Studies. Her article on ‘Narratives of disruption’, which included discussion of stories by Elsa Triolet and Vercors, appeared in the first volume of FCS in 1990; thereafter she edited two special issues – on ‘Crime and punishment’ in 2001 and on the Occupation in 2011 – and published a number of her articles in the journal so well attuned to her own critical perspective. This special issue is therefore a continuation of, and we hope a fitting conclusion to, Margaret's original research which, over the years, has contributed so much to the landscape of French cultural studies.