ABSTRACT
Jean Garcin’s choice of title for his wartime memoirs was deliberately provocative. With the jacket cover – blue, white and red – showing the smiling Garcin crouching alongside two Resistance comrades in the victorious aftermath of the Liberation, the juxtaposition of the republican tricolour and the Cross of Lorraine, the traditional insignia of the Gaullist Free French Forces, with the stark black typeface of the title, Nous étions des terroristes, was jarring. Garcin’s title was an explicit reclaiming of the label used by both the Nazi occupiers and the Vichy collaborationist regime to denigrate, isolate and punish the gradually coalescing and increasingly offensive opposition to the armistice of June 1940 and the German occupation. Openly comparing the activities of the Resistance to those of American revolutionaries, Zionist insurgents in the late 1940s, Palestinian militants in the Gaza strip and the internecine conflicts in post-colonial Algeria, Garcin thus inscribed the French Resistance into a tightly-constructed litany of nationalist struggles for political sovereignty, all of which, he noted, had experienced similar denunciations at the hands of their opponents.2 The rhetorical device of citing anti-Nazi European resistance movements as precedents for violent opposition to what insurgent or terrorist groups viewed as illegitimate foreign occupation had been established in the post-war decades, particularly in Palestine and Algeria;3 it was, however, more unusual that the comparison should be evoked by a resistance veteran, even if he were steeped in the grand tradition of the French political left. Published in 1996, in Garcin’s seventieth year and shortly after his retirement from political life, the memoir constituted another step in the process of commemoration undertaken assiduously by Garcin in the years since the Second World War: 50 years of ceremonies, reunions, conferences, interviews, and public and private acts of remembrance were capped by the opening in 1996 of a Musée de la Résistance in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Garcin’s birthplace, and the town where his father had served as mayor until his
demission in 1940. Garcin’s memoir was dedicated to his father, Robert Garcin, deportee number 39554, who was arrested in a large-scale raid in September 1943, and who perished in Buchenwald in March 1944. The back cover of Garcin’s memoir reproduced the citation he received on being named an officer of the Legion of Honour in 1957:
remarkable wartime leader, with a legendary bravery. . . . For more than two years, through his audacious and intelligently-executed operations, [Garcin] caused consternation in the ranks of the enemy: destroying material, disrupting supplies by cutting multiple railway lines, successfully sabotaging petrol depots. With his men, who he trained to his own standards, [Garcin] prepared and executed approximately forty operations against the enemy, all successful. . . . Actively sought by the Gestapo, [Garcin] nonetheless continued his effective actions until the Liberation of the national territory.
