6 - The Thirty Years’ War

Summary

By 1958, Charles de Gaulle was back on the scene, President of a brand-new Republic, France’s Fifth. He meant to make the Resistance, with the deportation story wrapped up in it, a rallying point for the nation, and he had a monument of his own constructed, the Mémorial de la France Combattante, located at the fort of Mont-Valérien (where the Germans had taken résistants and hostages for execution) in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. The monument and the commemorative activities associated with it told the story of France’s thirty-year war against Germany. This was a story with de Gaulle and the Resistance cast in the starring role and with the Left, communist and non-communist alike, shunted to the margins. What is remarkable is how powerful this narrative turned out to be, organizations of deportees like UNADIF (but not FNDIRP) lining up under the Gaullist standard.