By Pierre Serna, historian, researcher at the Institute of History of the French Revolution, IHMC
The Rendez-vous de Blois, an event bringing together French and foreign historians each year around a theme, on a weekend in October that has become ritual in the school and university world, has chosen as its theme year 2025: “France? » Grumpy minds, despite the question mark, will be able to criticize this choice, at a time when the problems that concern us every day refer to the need for a global vision of climate change, migratory crises, war disasters, or from the dysfunctions of an ever harsher capitalist economy to those left behind by a prosperity which favors only a tiny minority. Nothing would be more deadly in fact than to barricade ourselves within borders which confine us more than they protect us, or to stunt ourselves in the pursuit of an identity which could refer to the darkest moments of our history, and to the most serious deviations from nationalism reinvented by fear, ignorance of the culture of the other, or the civilizational fantasy of a country which would no longer be what it once was. The question mark forces us to question, on the contrary, what one, or rather stories, of France today could be. The question is salutary, because the past has become a cultural and ideological battle. At a time when the radical right is reinventing a historical novel, where Puy du Fou offers a backward-looking or biased vision of history, in which Vendée would be the heart of resistance to the State and the place from which it would have started the idea of freedom, it is good to reclaim the history of everyone. While history has become a spectacle, an entertainment, it would be beneficial not to leave to the forces of conservation the narrativity of a fantasized history, where the great men, or the well-chosen populist heroes, embody a single and unique in France.
In a most successful comic strip 1Jean-David Morvan, Emmanuel Moynot on drawing and Benoît Lacou present us with a striking vision of a possible history of France. The interpretation they give of “The Army of Shadows”, based on the novel by Joseph Kessel, tells a possible history of France, in symbiosis with historical research which, today, instead of looking at a history from above, looks at experiences lived at ground level. A history of the invisible, a history of the unknown, paying all passengers of history the appropriate tribute and putting them back in their rightful place in a history of the Resistance. The latter is regularly criticized because it would have constructed the myth of a France entirely opposed to the occupier. On the contrary here, “the friends of the factory, the suburbs, the castles, the gendarmes, the railway workers, the smugglers, the merchants, the young girls and the poorest” are honored. The brotherhood of clandestinity is worth all the testimonies of bravery. Moynot's drawing reveals these anonymous faces who can pronounce these sentences: “I was impressed by what Gabriel Péri wrote before he died”, “I am happy, we are preparing for the bright tomorrows”. We rediscover with emotion and pleasure the known passages of the novel, immortalized by Melville's film in 1969, and skilfully staged by Morvan. We like to reread the sentences of Saint-Luc, the head of the secret network: “We know that our soldiers change their names a hundred times and that they have neither shelter nor face. They go secretly in shapeless shoes, on paths without sun and without glory. We know that our army is hungry and pure. That she is an army of shadows. The miraculous army of love and misfortune. » The essential is there, in this possible history of a France which, as an aristocrat turned patriot said, “I prefer it to be red rather than to blush”. We would like to place an exclamation point. To meditate when preparing the Blois program for October 2025: “France? »
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