Muted Memories: Gendering The Memory Of The French Resistance

Through analysis of a range of oral testimonies and written memoirs this dissertation analyses gendered patterns in the memories of French resisters during the Second World War. The research considers the possibility of elaborating a gendered memory of the French resistance. Source material spans a period from 1945 into the 2000s, and includes testimonies from a selection of male and female resisters. The resisters for the case study were chosen on the basis that they testified a number of times over the period in question. The dissertation has three chapters: chapter one looks at how women and men explain their entry into resistance; chapter two analyses their recollection of their own role in the resistance and chapter three considers the place they assign the resistance within their wider life history.

The main findings are that women tend to frame their resistance within a network of references to other people: they do not talk about themselves at length and play down the role they played. Men constitute themselves as subject of their narrative and emphasise their individual role and trajectory. Discursive structures were shown to play a crucial role in resisters' narratives and self-presentations, as both men and women attempt to find suitable narrative frameworks within which to situate their experiences. The influence of the heroic fighter figure can be seen in male narratives, whereas women attempt to adapt traditionally female narrative models to their exceptional experiences. Resistance memory is shown to be gendered but the explanation for this is located in the impact of gendered discourses on narrative construction. Essentialist arguments are rejected in favour of a view which sees (resistance) memory in a dynamic relationship with discursive structures: changes in the latter result in changes in the gendered patterning of memory.