The Sorrow and the Pity
Chronicle of a French town under the Occupation
A film by Marcel Ophuls (1971)
Instruction booklet for Week 8
Rationale
Explanation and preparation
What you need to know
Questions to consider
Roles and reading
Further reading
Rationale
In Week 8 we structure our seminar discussion around a role-play exercise
based on the interviewees featured in Marcel Ophuls’ documentary film The
Sorry and the Pity.
The objective of the role-play exercise is not to recreate the lives of these
people, whether during the Occupation or during the making of the film. The
aim, instead, is to foster understanding of their positions during the war and
the ways in which they either defended or criticized the opinions they had
held and action they had taken during the ‘dark years’, 1940-1944. You will
be encouraged to think within the mental frameworks and experiences of
your assigned roles, and to imagine what choices were possible for them
under the Occupation.
What is role-play?
This role-play exercise will allow you to get inside the skin of the past by
understanding the experiences and attitudes of a survivor of the Occupation.
It is NOT a performance of acting ability, requires no dressing up, no props,
no audience and NO THEATRICALITY. There is no stage: rather, you will
conduct the exercise in the normal seminar setting merely as a different kind
of structured discussion.
Why do role-play?
This exercise has been inserted into the seminar programme to liven up our
regular format by giving your something different, and more fun, to do. In
getting inside the skin of your interviewee(s), in empathizing with them and
understanding their point of view, you will have a chance to explain that
person’s motives and outlook to the rest of the group, thus increasing your
level of tutorial participation. Secondly, you will effectively be engaging with
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primary source material (ie. The documentary itself), the very evidence that
professional historians themselves explore in order to produce historical
knowledge. Finally, you will understand how these interviews conducted in
the 1960s illuminate the broader problem described by Henry Rousso as the
‘Vichy syndrome’, and you will consider how far this film can be viewed as a
piece of revisionist historical interpretation.
Explanation and preparation
Each group member will choose an interviewee before we start watching the
film and will have prepared for the role-play exercise in Week 8 by watching
The Sorrow and the Pity from that man or woman’s point of view. You will be
guided in this reading of the film by your reflection on the questions listed
under your interviewee’s details in this booklet, and will come to the session
prepared to describe and discuss how the interviewee experienced the war
years and how they recall them in the late 1960s.
How will the role-play exercise take place?
I will introduce the session by describing the film and the context in which it
was made, before calling upon each interviewee in turn to introduce
themselves and to explain to the rest of the group how they experienced the
war, and how they remember those experiences from the point of view of the
late 1960s.
How do I prepare for the exercise?
You will:
 read this booklet in detail to understand the nature and point of the
exercise
 watch The Sorrow and the Pity from your interviewee’s point of view
 be prepared to discuss and to answer, as outlined below, the particular
questions pertaining to your role and the general questions to consider
What you need to know about The Sorrow and the Pity
Marcel Ophuls was born into a German Jewish family who settled in France in
the 1930s, but who emigrated to the USA in 1941 in order to escape the
consequences of the Vichy Jewish statutes. His father, Max Ophuls, had
himself been a filmmaker. Ophuls junior filmed the interviews for Le Chagrin
et la pitié in 1969, and the film was financed by Swiss and German television
companies. Indeed, the film was intended for French TV station ORTF, but
the director-general of the station refused to show it on French television on
the grounds that it ‘destroyed myths that French people still needed’. Perhaps
coincidentally, Ophuls had been sacked by ORTF for his part in the
disturbances of May 1968. The film was, in the end, released in art-house
cinemas in Paris, where it ran for 87 weeks and played to some 600 000
people. The controversial film had found an audience.
Ophuls set out to make a film about the memory of the Occupation, rather
than a film about the Occupation period itself. The film is essentially a tissue
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of interviews conducted in and around the central city of Clermont-Ferrand,
quite close to the town of Vichy. The interviewees range from a former prime
minister to male or female members of the anonymous ‘masses’. The richness
and structure of the interviews suggests that for Ophuls and his associates
the film intended to capture the relationship of these men and women to their
wartime past. The title is derived from the words of ‘Français moyen’,
bourgeois pharmacist Marcel Verdier, who uses the words to describe the
emotions elicited during the years of the Occupation. His own experience of
the Occupation was not marked by overt political choices: his world remained
the private life of his family and the problem of feeding his children.
Despite its success, the film remained controversial, and was criticized by
those on the Right and Left for its apparent challenge both to the Pétainist
myth of the Vichy ‘shield’ and to the Gaullist – and communist – myths of the
resistance. Conservative former collaborator Alfred Fabre-Luce was hostile to
the film’s anti-Pétainism, yet liberal politician, Simone Veil, criticized the film
for showing a cowardly and selfish nation. Indeed, the interviewees included
former collaborators like Laval’s son-in-law René de Chambrun and the
enigmatic LVF volunteer Christian de la Mazière, who reminded the audience
of the fact that not everyone had accepted the authority of de Gaulle and the
resistance movements. The testimony of Jewish resister Claude Levy
demonstrates Vichy’s complicity in the deportations of Jewish children from
France. Yet other critics, and historians, admit that the film is squarely on the
side of the Resistance and remains judgemental of collaborators like René de
Chambrun, who is not portrayed in a flattering light. The resistance Grave
brothers, on the other hand, emerge as heroes. How far did this film really
represent an attack on the notion that France remained a ‘nation of resisters’
during the Occupation?
Whatever the nature of its revisionism with respect to the Resistance, The
Sorrow and the Pity paints a clearly judgemental picture of the Vichy regime,
and, for its deportations of Jews in particular, shows the bankruptcy of the
notion that Vichy was ever a shield for the French population. At the time of
its release, the only comprehensive history book that focused on that troubled
period was Robert Aron’s The Vichy regime (1954) which offered a defense of
the Vichy regime’s role in protecting the French masses from greater German
brutality.
This documentary is frequently hailed as perhaps the first concerted attempt
to revise the historical understanding of what Vichy and the Resistance had
entailed in France, and to lay bare the paucity of discussion ever since where
the complexity of that time was concerned. Whether or not The Sorrow and
the Pity was the first such work of revisionism, the years that followed
witnessed the publication of several history books and feature films that
represented deliberate attempts at revisionism. No longer was popular
discussion silent on the issue of the complexity of the Vichy period. On the
contrary, according to Henry Rousso, a ‘forties revival’ or ‘mode rétro’ marked
the 1970s cultural scene. That interest in the Vichy past was not limited to the
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entertainment industry. Historians (such as Robert Paxton) and lawyers (such
as Serge Klarsfeld) published the fruits of research into the ways in which the
Vichy regime had openly collaborated with the Germans and, in particular,
had participated willingly in the Holocaust.
How convincing is Rousso’s argument about the pervasiveness of this
revisionist ‘mode rétro’? If such a phenomenon did indeed exist, what forces
precipitated it? Rousso himself wonders how far de Gaulle’s own death in
1970, the shifting boundaries of discussion after the events of May 1968, and
generational change may have driven such a revisionist impulse. Protest
posters issued during the events of May 1968 had certainly aired a criticism of
the processes by which information, of any kind, was passed on to the public,
and a criticism of the ways in which the state had control over that
information. It is significant that it was the state-owned television channel,
ORTF, that had effectively censored the interpretation of the past offered by
The Sorrow and the Pity by refusing it to be broadcast on French television.
More recently, critics of the film have wondered why the role of women
during the Occupation was marginalized in the documentary: the only female
interviewee is Mme Solange, the hairdresser, who is associated with a kind of
petty collaboration. Gender historians like Siân Reynolds have seen this
absence of women as symptomatic of a more general sidelining of women in
French historical constructions of the past. Even though women played a role
on the barricades of May 1968, for example, their activities have often been
overlooked in reports of those events, or reduced to women’s decorative role.
Questions to consider
 Why was the film controversial upon its release in 1971?
 Why was it not shown on French TV until 1981?
 How does the film pose a revisionist interpretation of the war years?
 Who was Marcel Ophuls?
 Does the film suggest that France was a ‘nation of resisters’ or a
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‘nation of collaborators’?
How does the film illuminate the ‘Vichy syndrome’?
How is de Gaulle portrayed in the film?
How is the Vichy regime portrayed in the film?
How are Germans portrayed in the film?
Why were former collaborators interviewed for the film?
How are women portrayed in the film?
How are class issues portrayed in the film?
How do the interviewers in the film make implicit judgements of their
interviewees?
How does film function as a ‘vector of memory’?
Can a film every render a historical account with integrity?
How can the historian use film as primary source evidence?
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Roles and reading
Core reading
The only piece of core reading is Stanley Hoffman’s introductory piece,
entitled ‘In the looking glass’, which appears in the English translation of the
screenplay: M. Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity: chronicle of a French city
under the German Occupation, (1972), pp. vii-xxvi. You might find it useful to
follow the film by browsing the English screenplay itself. Several copies are
available from the tray outside my office door, all of which also contain
Hoffman’s introduction. You need do no further reading, but biographical
information on the politicians that feature in the following list can be found
widely in textbooks on the period, such as those by Julian Jackson or Maurice
Larkin.
1. Georges Bidault
Why was Bidault interviewed in the film?
What role did he play in the Resistance?
What post-war activity was Bidault involved in?
How does Bidault describe his wartime experiences?
What is the interviewer’s attitude to Bidault?
2. Comte René de Chambrun
Why is de Chambrun interviewed in the film?
How is de Chambrun interviewed in the film?
What was de Chambrun’s position during the Occupation?
How does he describe his wartime experiences?
Does he defend or criticizehis position during the war?
What has his post-war life been like?
3. Jacques Duclos
Why is Duclos interviewed in the film?
How is Duclos interviewed in the film?
What has Duclos being doing since the war?
How did Duclos experience the Occupation?
How does Duclos describe his Occupation experiences?
4. Alexis and Louis Grave
Why are the Grave brothers interviewed?
What is the attitude of the interviewers to them?
What is the role of the women in their household during the interviews?
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What have they done during the war?
How do they recall and defend those experiences?
5. Georges Lamirand
How is Lamirand interviewed during the film?
Why do you think the filmmakers included him?
What did Lamirand do during the war?
What has his post-war activity been?
How does he recall and defend his wartime experiences?
6. Claude Levy
Why is Levy’s testimony included in the film?
How is Levy interviewed?
What did Levy do during the Occupation?
How does Levy recall and defend those experiences?
7. Christian de la Mazière
Why is de la Mazière’s testimony included in the film?
How is he interviewed in the film?
What did de la Mazière do during the war?
How does he remember and defend those experiences?
8. Pierre Mendès-France
Who is Pierre Mendès-France?
Why is he interviewed in the film?
How is he interviewed in the film?
How does Mendès-France recall and defend his activities during the war?
What was his activity under the Occupation?
9. Madame Solange
Why is Mme Solange interviewed for the film?
How is she interviewed?
What had she done during the Occupation, and since?
How does she remember and defend her experiences?
10.
Marcel Verdier
Why is Verdier interviewed for the film?
How is he interviewed for the film?
What was his political and social experience of the war years?
How does he remember and defend his experiences?
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11.
Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie
Why is d’Astier interviewed for the film?
How is he interviewed?
What did d’Astier achieve during the Occupation?
How does d’Astier de la Vigerie remember and defend those experiences?
How does he describe the resistance?
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