Making the resistance French: bureaucracy, memory, and space in postwar Marseille

This dissertation examines postwar state recognition of resistance during the Second World War in France from below and the margins. It focuses on the postwar commemorative politics regarding the resistance and liberation of the Mediterranean port city of Marseille, a place with a long history of challenging French universalist claims. To understand how state power and national belonging was instantiated locally, I analyze the bureaucracy that arose in postwar France from laws establishing an official definition of resistance as well as a formal process for applicants to prove past involvement in wartime underground movements that left virtually no records of membership. One such category was the combattant volontaire de la Résistance (CVR). The resulting bureaucratic encounters also played an important, if ambivalent, role in the consolidation of state power during the Cold War and decolonization, as a means of bringing local commemorative cultures in line with dominant French narratives and coopting potentially threatening political actors. However, instead of putting commemorative conflict to rest, the state opened up a new battlefield regarding the memory of anti-Nazi resistance both within and in rejection of the applications for official recognition. Contradictions and disputes arose regarding the status of colonial soldiers in official commemoration of the war, as did the question of how to distinguish between "true" and "fake" resistance in the wartime underground. The very administrative framework that sought to erase their involvement actually preserved the stories of many people who otherwise left few archival traces. Furthermore, the state commemorative narratives helped provoke a vibrant commemorative counterculture. This critical re-reading of French bureaucratic sources has far-reaching implications for how historians of the Second World War might approach this major archive, for understanding the uneven geographies of state power, and how to think about commemoration with and beyond the nation-state. Furthermore, it seeks to recover the political possibilities and challenges of a heterogeneous antifascist movement that was only made in France's image after the fact.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference