In memory of my father, Joseph Salazar, of the Free French Expeditionary Corps, 63rd African Artillery Regiment, who fought for mère patrie, was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and was mentioned in dispatches by Marshall Juin for “imperturbable bravery under intense enemy strafing.”
French prendre le maquis translates loosely as “taking to the hills.” Maquis is the main signifier of the French Résistance inside France (résistance intérieure), a movement against German occupation that began right after the defeat of June 1940 sealed by the armistice of 22 June 1940 and gained momentum after November 1942, when German armies seized control of the South, hence controlling the entirety of mainland France. The extraterritorial resistance of combatants were styled Free French, under the com-mand of General de Gaulle, primarily based in London and later in the French provinces of nowadays Algeria, as well as in l’Empire (territories under colonial governance), vast areas across the globe that by and large remained outside German control.
To be Occupied and be Made Immobile
Thus, up to November 1942 territorial sovereignty was divided. The country was split into two main zones by a Ligne de démarcation (Demarcation Line): roughly the North and Atlantic West, or zone occupée (occupied zone) in which the victor exercised its rights according to the laws of war (and it did so diligently, until the Résistance got underway); the South (less the Atlantic provinces), or zone nono (no-go zone), a pleasantry for zone non occupée since the North and West was called derisively zone Ja Ja (yes, yes in German). The two zones faced each other, with limited freedom of movement within the occupied one, severe restrictions on crossing the Line, and a relative freedom of movement under the newly, constitutionally established État français in the South. Further, population movements to and from northern and eastern border regions (prohibited zones), and inside them as well, were in essence forbidden.
So, after the largest, single mass movement of refugees to date in Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when in May and June 1940 alone nine million people fled across France, known as l’Exode (with an emphatic capital E; the Exodus), that population became captive, and came to a standstill, grounded, brutally locked in. Not being able to move at will became a quotidian reality. Checkpoints everywhere. To move about was, in essence, criminal, symbolized and enforced by the arbitrarily delivered Ausweis (pass).
In addition to being torn asunder by the Line, the French were also subjected to a hardly spoken of “democide” due to the German policy of aryanisation (racial Germanification) of the Eastern provinces’ population. Also, two million prisoners were held captive in camps outside France, “out-grounded” until, following the collapse of Germany, they were rapatriés (repatriated; this compassionate word appeared then, but it changed to one of opprobrium after 1960).
Sartre got an Ausweis of sorts when the German governor of Paris allowed him to stage his play Huis Clos (No Exit, 1944). An appropriate title, censors let it pass.
No other world power had, in modern times, been subjected to such strictures.
Stability Enforced by the Demise of an Unstable Republic
The État français came into existence in July 1940 when the Socialist-dominated Chamber of Deputies (elected at the time of the Popular Front in 1936) and Senate, meeting concurrently as a National Assembly, voted to remit all powers to Marshall Philippe Pétain, a hero of World War I (569 aye, 80 nay). Communist parliamentarians had been ostracized, following the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The Constitutional Act placed “the Government of the Republic in the care of Marshall Pétain in order to promulgate a new constitution for l’État français.” Soon enough, that innocuous phrase, État français, became the name of the new State, recognized, inter alia, by the United States. Such performative subversion had a precedent. When Bonaparte made himself emperor (Year XII of the Republic; 1804), the Senatorial Act said, “The Government of the Republic is entrusted to an Emperor.” The performative of 1940 copied that of 1804 and in both cases the Republic was doomed. In both cases, the mention of “Republic” quickly vanished from official discourse. Why do semantics about “State” matter for my argument?
Since 1793, the Republic had been an unstable State (the First Republic had no fewer than five constitutions), a regime barely recognized as legitimate by significant segments of the French population until World War II. Its demise in 1940 drew a symbolic demarcation line that still divides French politics today. “État” was truly an anti-Republican statement about stability. After a hundred and fifty years of recurrent upsets, seen as inherent to the republican regime, a State existed at last. Charles Maurras, the intellectual figurehead of the powerful anti-Republican movement, called the 1940 defeat a “divine surprise.” No hand of God here: he was an atheist; but “divine” as in deus ex machina, the machine of war.
In that context, the Résistance movement projected itself as a promise to maintain the Republic and to undermine the usurping État that aided and was aided by the occupying forces. However, to resist meant to move, to challenge the immobility imposed by the armistice (meaning arms are laid down, military movements cease), and to revive and maintain France as a “free state,” la France libre. If space mattered indeed—the national territory being “occupied”—time came to matter more in 1944–1945, at the moment of Libération (in French the word is an absolute signifier, always capitalized) when the violent, extrajudicial, or via exceptional jurisdictions, policy of Épuration (purges) took place.
Much could be said about the legitimacy and legality of “state of exception” of the Épuration. It is still a matter of fierce contention. Time mattered. Questions were asked of Résistants: When did you cross the Line and “move to the hills”? Who betrayed by crossing over to Germany and submitted to the Service du travail obligatoire (forced labor service) of the Reich, and when? On which side were you in 1940, in 1942, and so forth? From 1950 to 2008 only four (then five) syndicats (trade unions) that had proven “patriotic” during the German occupation had full legal status.
Procedure recognizes the right of veteran associations who wish to defend “the moral dignity and honor of the Résistance and its deportees” to sue civilly for damages perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Résistants (concurrently to criminal proceedings—as in the Klaus Barbie trial).
To sum, what was at stake after Libération was the Résistance’s promise of an amplified movement toward an ideal Republic, the completion of a trajectory achieving stability, that is, a full liberation.
To Resist, to Project, to Promise
The Gaullist concept, during the war, was also to refuse demonizing the Republic’s proven instability, a cause for its demise in war, and to project “the Republic” as an ideal to fulfill, if necessary by an institutional coup d’état, which is what happened in 1958 after ten years of postwar turbulences caused by yet another unstable republic (the Fourth).
Thus, Gaullism in the 1950s presented itself as a movement, not a party, pursuing Résistance at another level, liberating the nation from the shackles of parliamentarism. The promise of its teleology was to have the Republic be accepted by all, and as the French nation’s natural form of government. In competition with Gaullism, the concept of the French Communist Party, “the party of the Fallen” (Communist patriots did pay a price) and the most powerful communist party in the West, was to project the promise of the Great Revolution of 1789 and of its subsequent phase, the Leninist revolution of 1917, thus bringing to completion their momentum.
In both concepts, Résistance was not merely a hapax, a countermove to the Débâcle and the Défaite of 1940 (again, these words are absolute signifiers, always capitalized), it was a movement launched to achieve a teleology inaugurated in 1789 and projected beyond Libération in 1945, toward the achievement of a promise yet unfulfilled, that differed according to the two main ideological movements, but were united in their belief in the momentum of its original promise: liberating the French from any sort of oppression.
The Under and Above of the Ground called Mère Patrie
The Résistants’ practical concept of what was the ground to be liberated was specific. Semantics, again. It was named and defined as mère patrie. This trope is rather unique to French, in contraposition to what Germanic languages refer to as “homeland.” In the French idiom, fatherland (patrie) is a mother (mère) with the added emphasis that both words, mère and patrie, are grammatically and emotionally felt as feminine. It is an anthropological gendering Germanic languages locutors can neither feel nor fathom.
Countless narratives of the time bear witness to this near amniotic attachment to mère patrie, the mother-father-ground. How to define that ground in terms of the Résistance moves?
Underground is where the first move of the movement called Résistance happened. As early as June 1940 Résistants, from a wide range of political and intellectual opinions (from fascism to communism, and Christian pacifism), moved underground. They organized réseaux (networks; the French word gained specialized currency then). They began a dangerous yet resilient work of “undermining” the German forces, that is, laying a ground underneath the occupied land, tunneling under it. They were called later a “shadowland army.”
Above ground, the Résistance saw tens of thousands of young men usually older than eighteen join the incipient maquis. They fled from being rounded up for forced labor in the war factories and farms of Germany. They took to the hilly forests and mountains of the Pyrenees, the Alps and the volcanic heartland of Auvergne, the gorges of Dordogne, and the mounts of Brittany. The maquisards (commandos) counted 45,000 combatants in 1944. It is thanks to the moving, nomadic maquis, in small, agile groups, self-driven and often leaderless squads, that the Résistance, above ground, literally “gained, covered ground, regained ground,” re-creating the ground of mère patrie.
The Germans were caught unawares by this double move: réseaux and maquis. Germans were slow to understand that the laying down of arms, the legal armistice, framed by international conventions on the duties of an occupying force and of an occupied country, did not apply on a ground such as mère patrie. The legal, juristic, Germanic nomos had no value in the eyes of the Résistance, for whom liberation was imperative because it held the promise of freedom from tyranny set in motion in 1789.
Time now to introduce in my argument the Aristotelian twins, energeia and kinesis. Even though energeia and dunamis are paired, mostly in an Heideggerian approach of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the rhetorical cou-pling that matters, here, is that of kinesis and energeia [Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric]. What is at stake is how the Résistance, arguing for the Republic, achieved the twin rhetorical ends of any act of persuasion, to convince and to use all available means, that is enabling kinesis and energeia.
Résistance’s Kinesis of Jus Terrendi versus the Failure of Strategic Energeia
The Résistance was kinetic. By moving stochastically, nomadic maquisards reclaimed the occupied territory, piecemeal, at random, punching holes in German ordinance maps. They gained ground, figuratively and militarily, established ephemeral, or lasting, sovereignty over locales, and thus they reterritorialized and reclaimed mère patrie. For which they were labeled “terrorists”: a correct labeling if one believes, as the Germans did, that an armistice is a superior convention of war. Incorrect, if one considers that the Résistance momentum, initiated in 1789, relied now on jus terrendi as it did during the revolutionary Terror (hence the name): to repulse the enemies of the Republic as a universal principle of natural law, toward liberation.
Theirs was a practical return to a tenet of Roman law: to exercise terror is to defend one’s territory, hence there is a legal obligation, jus terrendi, to terrorize invaders. Many of the first-hour Résistants came from the most learned schools in France. They were aware of jus terrendi, they knew the theory of just war, they knew of the right to rebel against oppression. Résistance possessed a rare intellectual momentum.
Their idea of resisting was kinetic, that is: each action had to reach its aim, each movement had to complete its course, may it be blowing up a railway, a bridge, a fuel depot, in short, a node of enemy movement. There was never any real coordinated plan.
Yet, right up to mid-1944, the Résistance intérieure’s moves were resisted by the Allied command. The latter saw the maquisards as fodder to targets set according to their own strategic ends. Their formal design cast France as a theater of operations, including the merciless holocaust of French cities— war crimes, still unpunished. Thus, the Anglo-American command tried to control Résistants or rope them in, even when sabotage meant savage reprisals against French civilians. In parallel, the Gaullist leadership, extraterritorially located, was also concerned with design and planning. Neither command truly cared for nor even understood the kinetic moves of what was a rhizomic, nomadic deployment of Résistance groups, whether maquis or réseaux (the networks were often as stochastic as maquis raids).
Maquis and réseaux were driven by their own ideological beliefs, often at variance from group to group, yet all operated in the certainty that they were ruining, partisan attack upon partisan coup de main (raid), the centralized, planned seizure of the land by Germany. They were also preventing the enemy to deploy, to regroup, to move to the front, and to retreat—a cause for vengeful reprisals by the Wehrmacht. When the various groups agreed to call themselves by the acronym MUR, Movements of the United Resistance, they chose “movements,” plural, and went their own way, remaining often completely independent. The military, De Gaulle and Eisenhower, got a label to pin on maps. The military wants acronyms. It is part of its rhetorical makeup.
Yet, the Allies’ abuse of Résistance kinesis has left deep scars in French attitudes toward the rather recent, official epideixis of the Allied invasion as a massive planning and delivery success: the Anglo-Saxons speak often of the “invasion” of Normandy, which says what it is, while the French refer to it simply as débarquement (landing). To sum, the Résistance was kinesis, while the Allied or Gaullist command was energeia.
Regarding energeia, what was the Allies’ or Gaullist obsession with a formal strategic plan? To provide energeia to the kinesis of Résistance, that is form to action. To lay out all available means, to rally and coordinate, to design, to allocate, and to deliver. Such is energeia: it is, in an act of persuasion, to satisfy a formal need. Kinesis is about hitting a target, regardless of the means, at any cost, sacrificial in this case. Energeia is about following the field manual. And if energeia fails, and it does, to reassess and to correct procedures, as in the POLC framework of today’s management.
When Résistance intérieure’s kinesis was induced to become energeia, fit into a strategic plan, it resulted often in failure and massacres as at the Glières, a French Wounded Knee, and, ironically, in the capture, torture, and killing of Gaullist missus dominicus Jean Moulin sent to implement an overall planning. In rhetorical terms, energeia does not guarantee success (the same error has been repeated in Afghanistan recently).
Résistance as Epideixis
However from without the territory in shackles, the Gaullist leadership provided a different level of energeia. It took the form of speeches and broadcasts. Les Français parlent aux Français, the famous BBC resistance radio daily broadcast, proclaimed and projected values, epideixis.
Following De Gaulle’s 18 June 1940 call to fight and stay free, the constant flow of announcements, speeches, messages by the Free French radio did broadcast an epideixis of resistance. This proclamatory rhetoric formulated over four years value-based arguments defining what a liberated mère patrie should be and become. What the momentum was.
Within occupied France listening, at risk of arrest, torture and execution, to the Free French radio became a family covert ritual, an equivalent of or even a substitute to mass and homiletics broadcasts. The Gaullist Résistance abroad was the first large-scale resistance movement that harnessed radio, with a seasoned staff who, later, held high positions in the media. Such energeia lined up and projected ethical arguments for Libération to heterogeneous, captive audiences, laying the epidictic ground for the day after.
As in any rhetorical action, kinesis and energeia worked hand in hand. The Résistants cleared the ground. The Gaullist leadership spoke. Both knew that the movement set in motion by the Résistance was not meant to end merely with the expulsion of the Germans and keeping at bay the Western Allies whose design was to get to Berlin, using France as their passageway. The Résistance design was to set the mère patrie on a longer course, after Libération, by a relaunch of the republican movement itself, that is, the course and promise of 1789.
Résistance Charter, Kairos, and the Promise Set in Motion in 1789
In fact, a long-term instance of energeia took shape as the Résistance gained ground. The Résistance produced, in 1944, a charter, which is often today called upon as the refoundation of “the Republic.” The Résistance Charter projected the promise of a social republic, of a full-blown democratic state whose acquis sociaux (social rights) are inalienable, part of a “constitutional block” of principles (which they are today), yet always in progress, never in regress.
Those who moved to the hills, moved underground, moved to join the Free French, all agreed in 1944 that the Résistance movement was a kairos proffered by defeat. The unanticipated Charter, impossible to imagine in 1939, should serve to prolong the momentum of 1789 declaration of rights (personal and political), and thus reset “the Republic.”
Just as the Bolsheviks considered their own revolution as being on the same trajectory as the French Revolution, its dialectical advancement and a kinesis unaccomplished until a classless state is reached, and for that reason embedded in a strategic, formal design by the energeia of international communism, so did the Résistants project a movement from the 1789 Declaration to the 1944 Charter, and beyond, to “throw forward” postwar social liberation. Today one can hear, in France, that the social “promises” (from Latin promittere: to throw forward) of the Résistance are still valid, yet unfulfilled.
French society strains under an unachieved kinesis, a curtailed liberation, and an unachieved energeia, the formal plenitude of republican idealism. But it is moved by the pathic belief that both ends may be reached. The recent Yellow Vests near uprising and farmers’ “march on Paris” cannot be understood outside of this promise of a republican ideal on the move, aiming at its completion. That is, possibly, the exceptionalism at the core of the French concept of the Republic, and of the Résistance.
By way of conclusion, those historical tropes matter also as philosophical artifacts. Four examples. Deleuze’s idea of territory, of rhizomes and nomadic moves, owes much, in my view, to the intellectual afterlife of the Résistance maquis and réseaux for his generation (and for the school we both attended). Another is Foucault, whose concept of biopolitics bears the same imprint if one cares to look closely. Althusser’s recourse to the “line of demarcation” trope is explicit, albeit via a pious reference to Lenin (in the preface to the English translation of Pour Marx [For Marx]): but wasn’t he actually showing the trajectory from 1789 to 1917, to 1945 just mentioned? I believe so. One could also evoke Merleau-Ponty’s conception of corporality (The Structure of Behaviour was published in 1942). In his 1943 review of his fellow normalien Sartre’s opening night of his play The Flies, Merleau-Ponty wrote this: “Stop in Thebes, stand under the strafing by the sun, and feel the dirt, the stench, and the market flies, then you will understand on what ground of terror and cruelty the Greeks made liberty appear” [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Les Mouches,” in Parcours 1935–1961 (Paris: Verdier, 1997), 64, my translation]. He spoke of occupied France. These philosophical artifacts are a diffracted legacy of the Résistance’s project—to stay with these examples alone.
Historical movements are not always what they seem to be, especially to historians who have increasingly become courtiers and, worse, political “scientists.” That is why a rhetorician’s duty is to summon concepts of critical rhetoric, and to correlate topics apparently impermeable to one another, such as kinesis and energeia, and Résistance.
It is on purpose that, save for the mention of two sources, one out of gratitude, the other because it is not easily available in English, this article contains no roll call of references. As for my position on the matter, see Philippe-Joseph Salazar, “Scholarship Inferno—A Dantesque Meditation on Scholars in the Managerial Age,” The Postil, 1 July 2023
Featured: France Libre, Cross Of Lorraine enameled lapel pin.
