The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), Fifty Years Later: Part 1
An elderly man is standing in his small notions shop when someone comes in with a full film equipage of camera and sound and starts asking questions. The old man is sharply dressed in a suit, his World War I medals displayed in narrow bars on his left lapel. He is asked if he is Marius Klein, and he warily agrees. The intruder shows him a newspaper advertisement from 1940: “I have the honor to inform my faithful clientele that, contrary to some anonymous reports, I’m of an old French family of the Nord department. I was born in Dunkirk in 1893, and served in the War from 1914-18, along with my three brothers.” Klein acknowledges that he placed the ad. He is asked to explain, but of course there is no explanation, beyond the terrible fact that he put the ad in the paper because he wanted his customers to know that he was not Jewish.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of The Sorrow and the Pity, in which Marius Klein appears. Directed by Marcel Ophuls and completed in 1969 (though not released in France until 1971), it is an essential documentary about the years of Occupation during World War II in Clermont-Ferrand, in Vichy France. It includes contemporary newsreels as well as interviews with people of the town. Prominent politicians are asked to recall their actions during the war, many of them heroic; Pierre Mendès-France, the most important leader of the brief Fourth Republic (and Jewish) particularly shines.
The film can also be seen as the starting point for the politics of memory, the obsessional attempt to come to terms with the World War II past that consumed much of French intellectual, cultural, and political life in the late twentieth century. But The Sorrow and the Pity is also embedded in history as a product of its own time; and its time was 1969, just a year after the 1968 student riots, in Paris and throughout the West, that had announced the arrival of the baby boomers and the rejection of the myths of World War II. Many of the student graphic art posters that became a feature of Paris ‘68 reviled Resistance hero Charles de Gaulle, even pictured him with Nazi paraphernalia–because De Gaulle had been president for a long ten years, no doubt, but also because he had imposed on France a revision of the war and of their parents’ generation.
At different times in French history, after periods of great conflict, the leaders have commanded l’oubli, or forgetting. Henri IV did so after the civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, ordering in his 1598 Edict of Nantes “that the recollection of everything done by one party or the other, between March 1585 and our accession to the crown, and during all the preceding period of troubles, remain obliterated and forgotten, as if no such things had ever happened.” As used by Henri IV, l’oubli did not imply the disappearance of memories, but rather the conscious overcoming of them in the interest of national reconciliation. De Gaulle, in his desire to bring the country together after trauma, had proclaimed inaccurately that Paris had “liberated itself,” that France was a nation of resistors, that “all” of France had resisted; which of course they had not. He had essentially asked for amnesia and the substitution of a new set of memories.
Part I of The Sorrow and the Pity seems bent on exploding that particular heroic myth. Two teachers, MM. Danton and Dionnet, like Klein become leading exhibits for the quiet cowardice of ordinary men. Ophuls interviews them in the tranquil courtyard of their lycée Pascal, where they acknowledge that one or two of their colleagues had been summarily dismissed from their positions because they were Jewish. They assure Ophuls that they had truly been concerned, and had tried to throw some tutoring work their way. “Did you do anything? Did you all resign your positions?” Ophuls asks this, of course, from the safety of thirty years later. But then there follows a dialogue among the three that is a parody of l’oubli, or maybe of Waiting for Godot. According to the English subtitles from the film:
Danton: I was under the impression that there were quite a few students here who ardently supported General de Gaulle. For example, there was the son of a colleague whose name escapes me, and some others.
Ophuls: What about the teachers?
Danton: I really can’t say how many teachers supported him. We were sympathetic to the young people’s cause, but there wasn’t the same enthusiasm . . . the same enthusiasm at the beginning which was gaining momentum among the young people.
Ophuls: Why do you think that is? It often seems to be the case in life.
Danton: Young people are, in general, more sincere and more dynamic. They don’t think things through. I think it would be fair to say that they are less cautious. They are more open and friendly. What do you think, Dionnet? (Turning to him.)
Dionnet: They’re not as scared.
Danton: True. Some of my students got caught. I can’t really say who. Not so many, just a few of them. In fact, many of them now have streets named after them here. There was Bacaud. The street going to Fontviège is named after him. I taught this boy, who was charming.
Ophuls: He was in the Resistance.
Danton: Yes. These people, as Dionnet was saying earlier, had created a network. We only found out about it later. They continued to pretend they were just your average students. But we only found out about this later. Perhaps Dionnet, who was in the Resistance, knew. (No response.)
Ophuls: What was it like for the others? How did the others react when someone’s desk was empty?
Danton: I don’t know. I can’t remember.
Ophuls: When a student’s parents were arrested, and the son showed up at school the next day, how did they react?
Danton: I don’t remember.
Ophuls: How can you forget?
Danton, turning to Dionnet: Can you remember?
Dionnet: No, I can’t. No specific examples (both, almost in unison).
Ophuls: I see some examples on the wall. (Camera pans over a large wall plaque listing the names of those who had died.)
Danton: Those are our former students . . . Aren’t those the students who died in World War I?
Ophuls: No, it says World War II.
Danton: I’m trying to remember but I can’t.
One can see it all, in these moments, the effects of defeat and occupation and above all fear, even in the ostensibly “Free Zone” of Vichy, and especially with the story of Marius Klein. A northerner in a southern town. Suddenly subject to a whispering campaign. Some “difficulties” on his own part, from the authorities, because of his suspicious last name. The confrontation many years later with his pathetic advertisement, the consciousness of guilt, the memories flooding back. Four years of active duty in World War I.
Is the film too hard on him? Probably.
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Le Chagrin et la Pitié: Chronique d’une ville française sous l’Occupation. (The Sorrow and the Pity), 1971. France/Germany/Switzerland. Directed by Marcel Ophuls.
References are to the DVD of The Sorrow and the Pity, directed by Marcel Ophuls. The Milestone Collection (2000).
