page_title: Résistancialisme
section_title: Context
hierarchical_section_title: Résistancialisme / Context
caption_attribution_description: English: head shaving of women after liberation
context_page_description: "Résistancialisme" is a neologism coined by the historian Henry Rousso to describe exaggerated historical memory of the French Resistance during World War II. In particular, résistancialisme refers to exaggerated beliefs about the size and importance of the resistance and anti-German sentiment in German-occupied France in post-war French thinking.
  The term was coined by Rousso in 1987. He argued that résistancialisme rose among Gaullists and Communists soon after the war and became mainstream during the Algerian War. In particular, it was used to describe the belief that resistance was both unanimous and natural during the period, and justify the lack of historiographical interest in the role of French collaboration and the Vichy government.
  Rousso emphasises that résistancialisme should not be confused with "résistantialisme" who is a pejorative term used by Jean-Marie Desgrange to criticize individuals who retrospectively exaggerated or faked their own involvement in the wartime resistance in an attempt to enhance their own status after the war, for instance François Mitterrand.
context_section_description: The challenge for the French government in the aftermath of World War II was enormous. The end of German occupation immediately created an atmosphere of confidence and hope in the future and La Resistance became associated to this renewal. However, this positive and unitary attitude did not last. Soon, French people called for tougher measures against women and men suspected of collaboration. In addition to the legal purge (French: épuration légale) conducted by the French government from 1944 to 1949, France underwent a wave of public executions and humiliations known as the savage purge (French: épuration sauvage). These purges included the execution of at least 9000 people, and the head shaving of women who had had relationships with the German enemy.
  In this period of complete disorder and confusion, different voices from the resistance emerged; the two main voices being the Gaullist and the Communist. Hence the need for France to come up with a dominant unifying narrative that would later be referred to as the resistancialist myth, or simply resistancialism. This narrative presented the Vichy Regime as a parenthesis in French history which did not question "the righteousness of the French nation".
  The myth is often embodied by de Gaulle's Liberation of Paris speech, delivered at the Paris City Hall on the 25th of August 1944.
  "Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!"
caption: Shaved women accused of having sexual relations with German soldiers forced to parade.
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