Josephine Baker: the woman behind the icon
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A festival celebrating Josephine Baker takes place on 24 and 25 October at her former home, the Château des Milandes in Dordogne. Organised by the anti-racism group LICRA, it honours the actress, singer, wartime spy and civil rights campaigner. To mark the occasion, we look back at her extraordinary life, from the stages of Paris to the fight against racism. #RFI360
Historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch is inducted into French pantheon. Photo: AP
Those of us who studied history in university will likely remember the day a professor told us about the historian who changed the course of historical studies by moving away from the traditional way of recounting the past, which, until then, had focused on great figures, a military history of famous generals, and an almost obsessive examination of diplomatic documents.
This historian, along with other greats of the field, had set out to study the past in terms of its deep social interrelationships, drawing on methods from other sciences such as sociology, economics, and even psychology.
Up to that point, nothing in the story could inspire even the least enthusiastic of the students. But then the teachers told us about this historian’s life – or rather, about his death. A great lover of history and the French people, during World War II (after being removed from his professorship for being Jewish) he wrote a sort of academic testament in which he masterfully demonstrated what a historian’s work entails, but he never finished it because he decided to join the Resistance against the Nazis and their collaborators.
He was captured by the Gestapo, who tortured him for several hours before putting him before a firing squad. It is said that his last words were “Vive la France!” before the thunderous sound of German rifles ended the life of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.
His name was Marc Bloch, and a few days ago the French government decided that his remains should be interred in the Panthéon, a place where the remains of some of the most important men and women in French history rest. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Jean Jaurès, Marie Curie, Simone Veil, Aimé Césaire, among others, are part of a place that seeks to honor and immortalize the spirit of a nation – a place to which the historian is now added.
Bloch was born on July 6, 1886, in Lyon, into a Jewish family, although Bloch himself would say that the only time he would openly state that he was Jewish was when an anti-Semite was present. He fought in World War I, where he rose to the rank of sergeant and later to captain due to his valiant service, for which he was awarded the national Order of the Legion of Honor.
After the Great War, he returned to university classrooms, first in Strasbourg and then at the Sorbonne. In 1929, together with Lucien Febvre, he founded the now-famous “Annales d’histoire économique et sociale,” a journal that embodied the aspiration for a new way of telling history, focused on a vision of the past that moved away from mere biographies of great figures and accounts of major battles.
He wrote the now-classic history books “The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, Feudal Society,” and “Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940,” among others. But his most celebrated book is probably “The Historian’s Craft,” the aforementioned academic testament that seeks to synthesize his vision of the historian’s craft – a text that is absolutely indispensable for anyone interested in historical studies and that marked a turning point in the discipline.
And perhaps the most curious thing of all is that his most famous book is incomplete. Facing the nefarious Vichy regime, Bloch (who had already lost his property and his university positions because he was Jewish) decided to leave everything behind and join the French Resistance against the Nazis and the French collaborators. Precisely because he was a great historian, Bloch understood that although history is written in books, in moments of life such as those of World War II, it demands to be written even with one’s own spilled blood.
The anti-fascist Bloch thus became a symbol of the militant historian – one who, most radically, breaks away from any conception of the academic as an immune sage detached from reality. This image of Bloch, forged over time, inspired thousands of history students to approach the past with the seriousness required of those who dare to change a reality that, by all accounts, falls short.
Furthermore, he definitively shattered the old myth of the historian as that unblemished being who, neutral in his aspirations, chooses not to get involved in history so as not to taint a judgment that was supposedly meant to remain pristine. Bloch knew that pursuing impartiality in the face of history was impossible, so he decided to give his life for a nation he loved deeply.
President Emmanuel Macron has thus decided to induct another anti-fascist into the Panthéon. He had previously honored politician Simone Veil, artist Josephine Baker, and Armenian poet Missak Manouchian – all of whom, alongside Bloch, suffered and fought in their own way against the racist and predatory machinery of the Third Reich.
In his official speech, Macron highlighted Bloch’s “ardent defense of secularism.” “With heart and reason, a true republican, an ardent and tireless defender of secularism, Marc Bloch suffered the consequences of the state-sanctioned anti-Semitism instituted by Marshal Pétain’s government … Marc Bloch unites France and history, the Republic and science, government and reason. This approach and this connection remain today the best antidotes to the poisons of historical revisionism.”
Macron hopes to send a clear message against the far right, which appears to be growing by the day in France. In fact, the Bloch family requested that no representatives of any far-right political party be present at the induction of their ancestor into the Panthéon, a right that party leaders would normally have at such ceremonies.
This is because, curiously enough, intellectuals in France still play a very prominent role in public debate, and the far right’s reinterpretation of history – especially that which, in one way or another, vindicates the French far right to a greater or lesser extent (including those who collaborated with the Nazis and others) – has gained traction in recent years.
However, Macron is also facing criticism suggesting that his political decisions have facilitated the rise of the far right, such as when he dissolved parliament or, despite certain unofficial promises, decided to form a government without the participation of the left, which had pulled off a surprise victory at the polls despite the far right’s advance.
Despite this, the move has been applauded by most of the left, the center, and even by that nationalist wing of the French right that sees this medieval historian as a shining symbol amid a regression to very dark times for France. Bloch has thus become the heir to those who view the past as a fundamental tool for transforming the present.
And although he was a medieval historian, he was well aware of the dangers looming over France in the 1930s and 1940s precisely because he understood that history is sometimes a beast that seems very slow, but which at any moment can deliver a devastating blow that changes everything. Today, his example sheds light on the dark days of those who will come face to face with other beasts that are quickening their pace.
Courtesy: Breakthrough News
BANNED IN AMERIKA, MADE IN CANADA
Antifa: A Graphic History of its Origins
Cover art for the graphic novel Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-fascist Resistance edited by Paul Buhle and Raymond Tyler
Leonard Cohen sings a song called “The Partisan”. It tells the story of an antifascist fighter in the heart of the war against Nazism. Beautifully rendered by Cohen on his 1969 album Songs From a Room, it tells the story of an antifascist fighter and his squad in what I assume to be the French countryside. By the time the tune is over, the teller of the tale is the only survivor. In the middle verses, the listener is introduced to a woman who gives the three fighters shelter and “Kept us hidden in the garret/Then the soldiers came/She died without a whisper.” The tragedy in this verse, so beautifully told, represents the facts of resisting fascists; fascists whose concern for the lives of those whose opinions they don’t share is virtually non-existent and is perhaps exceeded only by the anonymity of those who bomb and kill from the sky.
Recently, the Trump regime made the modern antifascist movement—known as antifa—a primary target in its establishment of a fascist USA. Although my immediate reaction to the announcement labeling antifa as a domestic terrorist organization involved at least a couple jokes regrading the essential ignorance of the White House declaration, it was underlined by the potentially greater danger that ignorance created for opponents of the trumpist movement. Because there is no actual entity that is antifa, the forces of law and order can label anyone opposed to Trump and his authoritarian program a domestic terrorist. Once an individual or organization is labeled in such a manner, even the pretense of civil rights and liberties pretty much disappears. Likewise, so do people.
Fighting fascism is a serious business. The recent case of writer and scholar Mark Bray is but one example of this. Bray’s primary work opposing fascism was to write a book titled Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook discussing fascism’s modern manifestations and the nature of the opposition to it. Right wing students at Rutgers University where he taught began a campaign of harassment in an ultimately successful campaign to force him out of his job. The harassment included threats to his family and himself; threats that convinced him they should leave the United States. For people who know the history of those opponents of Nazism who left Germany during the early years of the so-called Third Reich, Bray’s exile can’t help but make them wonder who will be next. Or how far will the installation of fascism progress around the world in the current period. When does the opposition to fascism require more than sarcasm, more than protest and how would that opposition look?
Of course, only time will give us the answers to those questions. In the meantime, it seems like a good practice would be to familiarize oneself with the history of resistance to fascism. There are dozens of texts, films and websites that are quite instructive for that pursuit. Some are fictive in nature and others are straight-up history and analysis. One recent addition to this collection of antifascist history is a supremely rendered graphic history titled Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance. Edited by comics writer Raymond Tyler and longtime leftist historian Paul Buhle, this collection of handsomely depicted histories of various elements of the resistance to European fascism during World War Two is an inviting introduction to this under acknowledged aspect of the war against fascism in the twentieth century. The artwork, which ranges from the vivid colors of Seth Tobocman’s portrayal of the Yugoslav partisans under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito to the classical black and white cartoon panels of Daniel Selig’s entry on the French Partisans, invites readers young and old into a history that is simultaneously informative and inspirational. The narratives bend from the first person narrative of David Lasky’s water colored story of a Jewish uprising in eastern Europe to a story about the Soviet Partisans written and drawn by Raymond Tyler that reminded this reviewer of vintage Our Army at War comics from my 1960s childhood.
The different politics of various partisan groups is part of the conversation in several of the dozen stories in this collection. So are the differences based on ethnicity and religious beliefs. Women’s roles in the resistance are mentioned. Indeed, longtime comics writer Trina Robbins’ (the creator of Wimmen’s Comix) collaboration with artist Anne Timmons tells the story of three young Dutch women who served with the partisans in the Netherlands. Another story titled “Piccola Staffetta:My Small Contribution to the Resistance Against Mussolini” composed by Franca Bannerman, Isabella Bannerman, and Luisa Caetti is a tale about a girl who realizes she has been brainwashed by the fascists and joins the resistance performing small but important tasks. While reading this particular chapter, I was reminded of Hans Fallada’s novel about Nazi Germany and the small acts of resistance of a middle-aged couple, Every Man Dies Alone.
The moral of these stories and the watchword for any opposition to fascism is simple and evident throughout this graphic history. It’s not any kind of heroism that matters, but the resistance itself.
