A Tragedy of Betrayal and Revenge

A single photograph reveals the division, distrust and betrayal that tore France apart both during and after the war. It is of a local football team in a village (possibly Maintenon) in the Eure-et-Loir region, in which four of the players are related. They are Francis Fermine, fourth from the left, with his arms folded, in the back row. His two cousins, Omer and Noé Sadorge are at each end of the row and his brother-in-law, Pierre Sadorge is in the front with his arm round the captain.

Comment meurt un réseau by ‘Colonel Rémy’, Liberation.b.663, p.112-113.

Songs of freedom : “Les chants de la liberté, 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1944”

Political songs play an important part in popular culture and are powerful means of fostering and transmitting a sense of community and identity. Songs cross cultures and languages, as we discussed in an earlier blogpost on the French and American songs sung at the Liberation. On 14 July, Bastille Day, we want to shed light on another item from the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation collection: the Chants de la liberté (Liberation.b.130), a wonderfully illustrated collection of songs, accompanied by musical notation, which puts into perspective French political and historical struggles. Each song is accompanied by a didactic note, which provides some historical context.

Les chants de la liberté 1789, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1944 / réunis et harmonisés par Vincent Gambau ;                        préface de Bracke A.-M. Desrousseaux ; illustrations de Robert Fuzier.                                  Paris : Les Éditions de la liberté, 1945. (Liberation.b.130)

The title of the collection, which echoes the name of the publisher (the socialist Éditions de la liberté, well represented in the Liberation collection), places the Liberation of Paris at the end of August 1944 as the last of a series of revolutions in the history of France (brushing over the fact that the uprising led by the military resistant group FFI, French Forces of the Interior, could only be successful thanks to the arrival of the Allied forces). The editor and harmoniser, Vincent Gambau, specialised in popular, traditional and regional songs. The illustrator, Robert Fuzier, a member of the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière), participated in the Front populaire government in 1936. Engaged in the Résistance and in clandestine publishing, he was arrested in August 1943.

History in the making – thoughts on cataloguing the Liberation collection (Part 2)

Liberation.a.105

In the first part of my blog-post on working with the Liberation donation, I explored the fragmented and sometimes contradictory vision of history that the books in the collection offer, each point of view representing only a tiny portion of the actual events. In this second part, I want to expand on the odd feeling I sometimes had that the entire collection itself, despite offering quite a complete view of the period’s publishing landscape in France, was only a fraction of the whole story. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of the collection; indeed, what it doesn’t say is just as interesting from a historical point of view as what it does say.

History in the making – thoughts on cataloguing the Liberation collection (Part 1)

Liberation.b.377

In 2019, I spent 9 months helping to process the Liberation collection, a donation of over 3000 books in French published at the end of the Second World War. As this project is coming to an end, and with the current atmosphere lending itself to pause and reflection, now seemed a good time to share my experience of working with the collection. This will not be a full and objective review of what you can expect to find in it, but rather a more personal spotlight on what struck me the most.

When I started cataloguing it, I expected the donation would give me a complete and accurate view of what these extraordinary times were like in France. Yet if there is one thing that I will take away from it, it is that it is impossible to have a full understanding of history when you are caught in the middle of it.

Songs of the Liberation for VE Day

The Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection (1944-46) consists mainly of books, but also contains a number of French and English songs and music scores, some with striking illustrations. They appear either in individual leaflets or in larger compilations, including the lyrics and in some cases notated music. On the 70th anniversary of VE Day (Victory in Europe), on 8 May 1945, we would like to shed light on two illustrated covers for songs of the Liberation that we displayed on the occasion of the 2019 Liberation lecture (Normandy ’44 by James Holland).

Le chant de la libération : le chant des partisans, paroles de Maurice Druon et Joseph Kessel, musique de Anna Marly. Paris : Éditions Raoul Breton, 1945. Liberation.a.104