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Sarah’s Key (2011)

Just before dawn on July 16, 1942 the French Police began Opération Vent Printanier, or “Operation Spring Breeze.” That morning over 13,000 Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and trudged through the streets of Paris to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the Winter Bicycle Racetrack, on the rue Nélaton in the city’s fifteenth arrondisement. Situated next to the Bir-Hakeim métro, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the Vel’ d’Hiv’ (as it was commonly called) was the first indoor track in France that hosted numerous sport and cultural shows. But in July 1942 the Vel’ d’Hiv’ hosted a much different spectacle: the inhumane detainment of Jews before their deportation to concentration camps in Parisian suburbs, such as Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande, that sent Jews directly to Auschwitz. Inside of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ the French Police denied Jews water, food, medical attention, and even lavatories, treating the prisoners worse than livestock. Despite the atrocities that took place at the Vel’ d’Hiv’ and later in the concentration camps where families were separated and eventually convoyed to Auschwitz for extermination, the French rarely acknowledged or spoke about the Vel’ d’Hiv’. It was not until 1995 that the French Government, under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, addressed Vichy French compliance in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup and the Nazis’ ultimate answer to the “Jewish Question.”

Philippe Pétain meeting Hitler in October 1940. (via Wikipedia)

Though a work of fiction, Tatiana de Rosnay’s poignant novel, Sarah’s Key, helps inform the reader about the lesser-known atrocities committed against French Jews under Nazi occupation and the Vichy government. Simultaneously set in July 1942 and sixty years later in July 2002, the novel alternates narratives between the lives of Sarah Starzynski, a ten-year old Jewish girl imprisoned with her parents in the Vel’ d’Hiv’, and Julia Jarmond, an ex-patriot American journalist writing a piece on the sixtieth anniversary of the Roundup. In researching her article, Julia begins to discover tragic secrets about Sarah’s life that have a devastating impact on Julia’s own life sixty years later.

Weaving together mystery, history, and intense emotion, de Rosnay provides an engrossing story. Though at times the plot can seem somewhat predictable this does not significantly undermine the book’s success. What is most significant and moving about the book is de Rosnay’s piercing criticism of France’s seeming ambivalence and long denial of involvement in the atrocities of the Holocaust including the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup. As one character poignantly remarks, “Nobody remembers the Vel’ d’Hiv’ children, you know… Why should they? Those were the darkest days of our country.” Despite the dedication of several sites in Paris to the memory of those deported during the war, such as the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, there still remains a certain amount of unfamiliarity with Vichy France’s role in the Holocaust in France today. Sarah’s Key reminds readers that Vichy France’s compliance in the “Jewish Question” is not something to be forgotten or swept underneath the rug. It is a topic that deserves reexamination and further explanation.

Wikipedia on the round-up of French Jews
Mémorial de la Shoah website
A walking tour of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation with informative pictures

Trailer for the new film version of Sarah’s Key

Photo credits:
Jewish women in Paris, just before the roundup
Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive) via Wikimedia Commons

Life and Nothing But (1989)

By Judy Coffin

French historians love this film. It’s hard to convey the horrors of what was long called The Great War: the almost unimaginable losses at battles like Verdun and the Somme; the mobilization of whole economies, states, and societies to supply those battles and to replenish the men and material afterwards; the stench of rotting corpses (human and animal) in the trenches; and the grinding boredom of trench life – interrupted by terrifying bombardment or the dreaded command to go “over the top,” through the mud, barbed wire, and, further on, the machine gunners on the enemy side. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (with Kurt Douglas, 1957) captures some of the view from the trenches. So does PBS’s multi-disc documentary: The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. Not surprisingly, though, the most popular films about World War I – like the brilliant Lawrence of Arabia — are set far from the un-cinematic slog of the western front. Life and Nothing But is set on the front, but after the war, where the French are trying both to tally their losses and commemorate their victory. Both projects are heartbreaking and, in some important sense, impossible. That’s the point, and the film captures one of the tragedies of war and a more specific tragedy of twentieth-century French history.

Philippe Noiret plays French Major Delaplane, charged with trying to discover the fates of the over 300,000 French soldiers missing at the end of the war. Most of them were dead, it would turn out. 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, out of 8.4 mobilized. Delaplane presides over a ramshackle, improvised office filled with clerks compiling lists of the dead and descriptions of the missing. In the psychiatric hospital next door, teams of doctors work with soldiers whose minds have been destroyed: trying to get them to walk, to speak, or to recover bits of memory that might help to identify them. In the surrounding countryside, crews dig in a tunnel that had been mined by the Germans, destroying a Red Cross train and the wounded it was carrying. On designated days families of the missing are permitted on site, and they comb through long tables of rings, watches, and occasionally photographs searching for bits and pieces of their loved ones’ lives.

Into this melancholy scene come two women. Irène de Courtil, (Sabina Azena) wealthy and beautiful, is looking for her missing husband and the much younger, middle-class Alice (Pascale Vignal) searching for her fiancé, whom she met while he was a soldier. Alice had taught school during the war, but then had to give up her post to a veteran returning from the front. (This is a nicely understated rendering of the government’s policy after World War I.) She now is working in a café in the area near Delaplane’s project, hoping for news.

No spoilers here, and the plot matters! But you will find love, of course, and deception, class resentments, and cynicism (softened by love). It’s not grim, but haunting. It’s hardly an action film –- I don’t want you to be disappointed — but then World War I was not usually an action war. It’s about a country whose past is mined, literally and figuratively, but which is compelled to return to that past. It’s about memory, a subject that has fascinated historians for decades now. It’s smart about commemoration: Tavernier makes us ask what the French state wants to commemorate and how, what the families want to remember, and what Delaplane, Irène, and Alice, respectively, are looking for. It’s acerbic about the politics of commemoration too. Delaplane has to produce a body for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. “Ah non,” the government’s representative says refusing one of the bodies that the major offers him: “certainly not a black!” Why not? Roughly half a million troops from France’s colonies fought in the war.

France’s victory cost more than the country could pay. Reparations would prove a dangerous illusion. We know this, and we know what happened in a few decades later. But this film doesn’t preach or offer general lessons: it looks closely at a grieving culture, trying to gather up the pieces and move on – to what we now know will be another war.

More great French war films:
François Truffaut, The Last Metro

Marcel Ophuls, The Sorrow and the Pity

Marcel Ophuls, Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Jean-Pierre Melville, Army of Shadows

Joseph Losey, Mr. Klein

Louis Malle, Au Revoir les Enfants

Death and Decadence: Vatel (2000)

By Julia M. Gossard

According to the infamous seventeenth-century gossip, Madame de Sévigné, on April 24, 1671 François Vatel, distraught over the late arrival of fish for a banquet in honor of Louis XIV, committed suicide by impaling himself through the heart with a sword. Sévigné and other nobles speculated that Vatel, a well-known perfectionist, succumbed to the overwhelming pressures of planning an extravagant three-day banquet in honor of the king’s royal visit and decided to kill himself instead of having to face public humiliation for his failure.

Roland Joffé’s 2000 film, Vatel, is a reinterpretation of Vatel’s (Gérard Depardieu) death, portraying him as a victim of the rigid social politics that ruled seventeenth-century French noble society. In 1671 the Marquis de Lauzun (Tim Roth) delivers a message from Louis XIV to the Prince de Condé (Julien Glover) that the king wishes to spend three days at Condé’s chateau, Chantilly. Hoping to use this opportunity to raise his social standing, the Prince de Condé orders his “Master of Festivities and Pleasures,” François Vatel, to organize a lavish affair to impress the king and secure Condé a position as general in the upcoming military campaign against the Dutch Republic.

The film chronicles Vatel’s intense drive to create innovative and delicious meals, sumptuously decorated quarters, and beautiful performances including a water and fireworks show that will be used as the event’s grand finale for the king and the 2,000 other guests expected at the banquet. Despite Vatel’s meticulous plans, when the first day actually arrives mishaps abound. To complicate matters further, Vatel becomes enamored with Anne de Montausier (Uma Thurman), a beautiful women presumed to be Louis XIV’s new lover. Disaster after disaster occurs throughout the three-day festivities, with Vatel becoming increasingly disillusioned with the prodigal nobility, leading to his suicide.

Vatel illuminates the complexity of the early modern patronage system. A hierarchy existed, in which patrons were often clients themselves. In this case the Prince de Condé’s was both Vatel’s patron and the King’s client. The patronage system was so deeply embedded in the minds of early modern people that, as Vatel demonstrates, one misstep resulting in the loss of a patron’s favor could mean social (and even actual) death. Clients worked solely to serve their patrons, knowing that their livelihood depended on their patron’s benevolence. In Vatel, that service involved a luxurious, spectacle of sensory pleasures, the very decadence of which highlighted the costs of failure.

If you are a gourmand this movie will have you salivating within ten minutes. Not only do you learn the origins of whipped cream, aptly called “chantilly” in French, but the many palatable dishes created by Vatel play a prominent role in the film. Additionally, the film is a visual feast for the eyes. Shot primarily on location at the Château de Chantilly in France, the setting is authentic and beautifully presented. While some of the vividly colored costumes and synthetic hairpieces are not necessarily unique to the seventeenth-century, overall the costumes, jewelry, coiffures, and other accessories work together to portray the luxurious ambiance that surrounded the king and his nobility. For anyone interested in the lavish, extravagant, and decadent French nobility of the seventeenth century, this is a must see movie.

For more on the history of French cuisine, you can read Susan Pinkard’s, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1789 (2008)

A wonderful children’s book, called A Medieval Feast, by Aliki, details the extraordinary lengths the nobility were expected to go to entertain the French king when he decided to come for a visit. Delightful illustrations depict social and cultural events with considerable historical accuracy (though for a somewhat earlier period).

The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV by W.H. Lewis (1997) discusses social life under Louis XIV.

In The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1994), Peter Burke explores the ways Louis XIV was represented in painting and other images to show how the Sun King consciously managed his public image and invented a new image of the king.

See also our READ section for Julia Gossard’s recommendation of a book about this period that treats some of the same issues as this film, A Tale of Two Murders.

A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France by James Farr (2005)

by Julia M. Gossard

With all of the components of a riveting murder-mystery, including a baffling disappearance, a set of gossipy characters, a love triangle, conflicting evidence, and a scandalous trial, A Tale of Two Murders: Passion and Power in Seventeenth-Century France by James R. Farr is a fascinating read. Farr chronicles the investigation and subsequent trial of Philippe Giroux, a wealthy nobleman in Dijon. The trial enthralled Dijon’s inhabitants and the whole of French noble society from 1639 to 1642.

In the growing city of Dijon, France on September 6, 1638 Pierre Baillet and his valet, La Valeur went missing. Immediately after learning of the men’s disappearance, maidservants, apprentices, shopkeepers, and other workers began to gossip in the streets about what had happened to Baillet and La Valeur. Some argued Baillet simply left town unexpectedly while others spread more sinister rumors of foul play and murder. After six months of petty gossip a formal investigation finally began. Soon Jean-Baptiste Lantin, the investigation’s leader, found a primary suspect: Philippe Giroux, Baillet’s first cousin. As a président of the Burgundy Parlement, Giroux was a powerful and prominent member of society. However, when it became known that Giroux was involved in a passionate and secret affair with Baillet’s beautiful wife, Marie Fyot, and that Baillet and La Valeur had dined at Giroux’s house on the night of their disappearance, Giroux became the focus of Lantin’s investigation. News of Giroux’s arrest sent shockwaves through the community, creating another firestorm of gossip and speculation that greatly influenced the course of the subsequent trial.

In addition to providing a captivating narrative, A Tale of Two Murders investigates the ways in which power, justice, law, and society all intersected and, at times, conflicted with one another in seventeenth-century France. Farr shows the conflicts between the formal powers of the judicial system and the informal powers of the nobility’s patronage networks and sketches in the community’s role as both witness and arbitrator. Informal institutions were paramount in determining not only which cases went to trial, but also the outcomes of those trials. A defendant’s reputation, as determined by the community, was of utmost importance in establishing whether or not an individual was capable of committing a certain crime. The judicial system in early modern France was a complex institution that favored those at the top of society. Vast patronage networks protected the nobility, making it very difficult for people to bring accusations against the nobility in court. But these patronage networks were not indestructible as the community could work to destroy an individual’s reputation by spreading rumors and accusations of particularly heinous acts.

A Tale of Two Murders produces a vivid illustration of the early modern French legal system, power dynamics, and society while providing the reader with a spellbinding story of mystery, gossip, love, lies, deceit, and murder. Readers who enjoy murder-mysteries will surely find Farr’s A Tale of Two Murders a captivating and informative read.

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