The Army of Crime, a soubriquet
bestowed on them by the Vichy Government, were an affiliation of resistance
fighters in Vichy France. They were primarily Jewish
immigrants, many of whom, including Armenians, Romanians and Spanish, had experienced
guerilla warfare in other countries prior to WWII.
One of the film’s strongest
points is the recreation of an authentic wartime Paris. We join the story at a point when the
Third Reich have their feet firmly under the table in the French capital,
uniformed soldiers are seen everywhere in the city. We learn abouth the German invasion of Russia during a scene at Place de la Concorde,
from where we can see the Eiffel
Tower draped in a German
propaganda banner. Neither here, nor elsewhere, does Paris seem to be anything other than the
occupied city that we are supposed to believe it to be. The image of the
musical ensemble of uniformed German soldiers playing for passers by in a city
park was new to me,
and exemplified the details that have gone into the recreation of
the time. Subway posters advertising opportunities for French workers in Germany, and
the antique subway train itself, are other examples of such detail.
The Army of Crime, we are told,
had their roots in politically motivated pamphleteering against the German occupation,
but their focus on more aggressive means escalated in tandem with Germany’s
increasingly bad treatment of the Jewish population. One of the resistance
fighters, Marcel Rayman, whose family members suffered directly in this regard,
because of their Jewishness, was particularly vigorous, using his pistol to
dispatch German soldiers in double time to the great mass rallies in the sky. A
central figure here, he is portrayed as, if you pardon the pun, a fiery young
man, and very brave, refusing to kowtow to the Wehrmacht’s unjust authority.
On the other hand, many French
were willing to collaborate with the invaders, and the term has a shameful
connotation for this reason. The issue of collaboration is perhaps as relevant
for today’s audience as the film’s ostensible subject, the resistance fighters,
and is repeatedly alluded to here. This allusion
sometimes is carried over by the authentic Vichy propaganda broadcasts of the day,
denouncing the resistance fighters and Jews, and at other times by the
behaviour of civilian informants. However, nowhere is the message more blatant
than when it transpires that the roundup and deportation of tens of thousands
of Jews living in Paris was the work of the
French alone : “not a single German soldier was
involved”, says an Obersturmfuhrer, congratulating his Vichy counterpart.
The fact that much of the dirty
work of countering the French resistance was performed by Vichy police has
resonances today, where civilian involvement in armed conflict is more and more
common, to the point where the number of civilian contractors in Iraq equal
military personnel, for example.
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