Love and Death in Occupied France

The judgment and the sympathy of Un Village Français.

Sometime early next week, if current trends in our TV-watching continue, my household will finally finish Un Village Français, a series set in a fictional French town near the Swiss border, Villeneuve, between 1940 and 1945, running from the arrival of the occupying Germans to the trials of collaborators after V-E Day. Reaching the finish line will represent a real binge-watching achievement, at least by the standards of the short seasons that American TV increasingly offers: Un Village Français ran for seven seasons, or 72 episodes in total, and so it’s been basically the only thing we’ve watched on television since early August (sorry, White Lotus). Sans regrets, mostly: The show has its rough patches and missteps and longueurs, but it’s achieved an impressive cohesion overall, with strong performances and compelling characters embedded into a complex, fascinating, horrifying story that (mostly) avoids predictability and caricature.

It’s a contemporary show, having aired in France from 2009-2017 before arriving on Amazon Prime more recently, but it has a somewhat old-fashioned feel, with a style that’s somewhere between the Dark Gritty Realism of contemporary prestige television and the more decorous Masterpiece Theater adaptations and Upstairs Downstairs-style period pieces of my youth. It’s grim and realistic but also reasonably restrained, with less explicit sex and violence than what I would imagine from an HBO version of its story — lots of death but little gore, fleeting rather than exploitative nudity — and a certain amount of storytelling artifice, with constant episode-to-episode cliffhangers as the most obvious example. The main characters at the start are, with a couple of exceptions, still the main characters as we near the end, there are no Ned Stark-style Shocking Deaths in the early going — a murder punctuates the end of season 1 but it’s not a big surprise — and you come to accept a certain contrivance in the way the show keeps its key players alive throughout the war and brings them back to Villeneuve even when wartime events have naturally carried them away; even when they’re sent to the Russian front, as happens with two key German characters, or they’ve fled to Switzerland or North Africa or elsewhere. This leads to some unlikely soap-operatic moments here and there — the coincidental re-appearance of a wounded soldier late in the action is particularly egregious — but on the other hand when a couple of key characters actually get killed in later seasons it packs a stronger punch precisely because you’ve grown accustomed to major-character survival.

The design of the show is discontinuous: Each season covers one or two major incidents or developments in the life of the town — the initial moment of occupation, the beginning of Communist resistance and Nazi reprisals, the round-ups of local Jews and the arrival of a train of Jewish deportees bound for hell, the founding of a Maquis force in the forests, and so on to liberation. This means that the show takes roughly six-month jumps between seasons, sometimes skipping over events that American audiences, especially, might expect to see dramatized: We get the town’s reaction to the liberation of Paris, for instance, but the D-Day landings happen offstage in between seasons five and six — as offstage for the viewer as they were for the inhabitants of the French hinterland.

Some of these selected vignettes drag more than others: The young men in the Maquis are less interesting than the older characters and the season where they stage a play in the woods feels like the screenwriters were struggling to figure out what to do with them, and the amount of time expended on a late-season trial of members of la Milice, the French-fascist paramilitaries, is not commensurate to our interest in the characters involved. But most of them work well, and overall I suspect the time-jumping style is reasonably faithful to a wartime experience far-off from the fighting — with a strange pseudo-normalcy a lot of the time, punctuated by sudden crises, bursts of craziness, irruptions.

But the show’s real triumph isn’t its structure or plotting but its characters. We talk a lot about how American TV post-Sopranos deals in shades of gray or makes you root for anti-heroes, but I really can’t imagine an American show being willing to work quite as hard as Un Village Français does to make you sympathize with a bunch of people who are often literally collaborating with Nazis, with whatever doubts or hesitation or partial resistance. The show is definitely not a hagiography of French Resistance but neither is it a Michael Haneke-style condemnation of the unique evil that lurks in the hearts of the small-town European bourgeois. There are a few characters who are mostly heroic or mostly innocent — though sometimes unlikeable despite their virtue — and a couple who are outright villains (more on that below), but mostly the theme of the show is that the occupation of France was a moral test that almost everybody failed, not because they were uniquely wicked or corrupt but because they were caught up in the middle of a drama whose ending was unknowable, whose true stakes clarified only gradually, and whose initial pressures drove people toward choices that compromised them bit by bit and drop by drop.

The show is particularly good at depicting how initially it wasn’t even clear what it would mean to “resist.” In Season 1 the immediate problems created by the fall of France are all about survival rather than politics — potential starvation, children separated from their parents, shortages of medicine, the works — so the audience naturally sympathizes with the figures who try to restore order, led by the town’s domineering doctor, Larcher (Robin Renucci), who becomes the mayor by default. Amid this disarray there is no locus for resistance whatsoever: The great hero of the Great War is in charge of the government and urging all patriotic Frenchmen to collaborate (the positive use of “collaboration” is one of the many jarring things you notice early on), the French Communist Party is taking orders from a Kremlin that’s still in its Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact phase, nobody in Villeneuve has even heard of Charles De Gaulle, and the idea that Germany is going to lose the war and its empire in five short years seems unimaginable. Even acquiring or keeping a gun is a fraught endeavor, the Germans control the supply lines in addition to everything else, a number of the men of the town are in POW camps, waiting for Vichy to negotiate to bring them home — and the SS hasn’t really made its appearance, so the difference between being merely occupied by les Boches and being ruled by National Socialism wasn’t yet entirely clear. Which means that everyone basically goes along with the occupation to one degree or another, and the show persuades you that in that moment you almost certainly would have, too.

With time, of course, opportunities for resistance open up and the depths of depravity required of collaborators become clear. But all this happens gradually, in a piecemeal array of opportunities and dilemmas and moral tests. People who become supporters of the Maquis often do so half-accidentally, sliding into roles through relationships, self-interest, forced choices, and even the contingency of when they figure out that the Germans are likely to lose the war. (If you realize it in ‘42 you can start making donations to the Resistance to hedge your bets; if you don’t realize it until ‘44 you’re destined for “national disgrace” if not the death penalty.) And for many people, while it’s fairly clear early on that enthusiasm for the new order is wicked and attracts wicked people on the make — the people most enthused about the “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses, say — the question of what to actually do if you recognize the truth of the situation and want to do the right thing remains opaque.

The sequence where Jewish deportees have to be temporarily housed in the Villeneuve school, awaiting a train to carry them to the French concentration camp at Drancy and then presumably to Auschwitz, is a particularly harrowing example. The townspeople who sympathize with the Jews, including Larcher, end up focusing their energies on two main projects — first figuring out how to feed and house the deportees and then trying to prevent the Nazis from splitting up parents and children before the journey north. These are both humanitarian projects but we know, as the characters do not (beyond rumor and fear, at this point), that they are irrelevant to the ultimate fate of the deported families. So all the strenuous efforts across multiple episodes to improve things on the margin end up amounting, from a God’s-eye view at least, to cooperation with the larger project of deportation, a kind of tacit assistance to the Final Solution — especially when individual Jews are constrained, not just by well-meaning Gentiles but by their fellow Jews, from escape attempts for fear of prompting general reprisals.

This awful reality of tacit cooperation is something Larcher comes to feel acutely, as the show progresses and his character is ground down from pride and competence to suffering and doubt … but notably, when he is no longer mayor and an enthusiastic Vichyite takes over, the shift gives the moral landscape more clarity but also makes the general situation worse.

Meanwhile the show is also good at showing why people who had no love for the Nazis might have regarded the actual Resistance, in its leaflets-and-assassinations phase but even once it emerged as a fighting force of sorts, as dangerous play-actors rather than heroes — because there really was an element of play-acting, a kind of domestic correlate of the France aujourd’hui et toujours game that DeGaulle played so extraordinarily well on the world stage. For instance, one of the Resistance’s great triumphs in the late-1943 sequence of the show is to pull off a patriotic march through the streets of Villeneuve on Armistice Day, which they accomplish through a bunch of trickery that sends the German forces elsewhere for the day. But this symbolic victory, pulled off by a bunch of young men hanging out in the forest, leads to immediate reprisals and executions and deportations in the town. Was it worth it? From a historical distance I would say yes — but the show succeeds artistically because it also makes you see why people who paid a direct and bloody price for Maquis theatrics might prefer, as one character puts it, to “sit quietly and wait for the Americans to come.”

I should say that this sense of sympathy for the unheroic French is not the only possible reading of the show. Writing for The Tablet last year, Michael Oren treated Un Village Français as a more thoroughgoing condemnation of the people it portrays. With the exception of what he describes as a “sentimental portrayal” of the local Communists, reflecting the left-wing backgrounds of the showrunners, Oren suggests that few of the characters “fare well in the series,” with the evil of the Nazis nearly matched by “sociopathic” Vichyites and “scarcely less sadistic policemen, rapacious politicians, and townspeople devoid of moral backbone.” Only the Jewish victims appear as basically decent human beings: Indeed, “relative to the rest of Villeneuve’s misanthropes, the Jews are practically saints.”

It’s certainly possible to see a left-wing thread in the show; one of its main weakness is a certain indifference to religious matters, with priests playing a smaller role in the life of the community relative to doctors and cops and politicians and only one major character, a naive schoolteacher (Marie Kremer) who falls for a German soldier, displaying any kind of strong Catholic faith — which seems unrealistic for a provincial French town in that era. (On the other hand the show could have easily chosen to be been more anti-clericalist and featured priests as key collaborators or anti-Semites, which it refrains from doing.) And maybe it’s my own Gentile privilege that leads me to sympathize unduly with the dilemmas of the Villeneuvians, and to find the cross-pressured characters less “misanthropic” or “sociopathic” and more fundamentally relatable even in their sins.

But I think my reading is the right one. The show’s Jews obviously come across better than the Gentiles because they’re being martyred rather than tempted, and the role of ingrained French anti-Semitism in smoothing the way for Nazi deportations is taken for granted as a core evil throughout. But anti-Semitism’s victims are given a full humanity, not just plaster sainthood. One rich French Jew makes reckless choices that lead to his wife’s capture by the Nazis and then, later on, understandable-but-disastrous moral compromises that sabotage a Resistance cell; another falls into an extremely complicated relationship with one of the town’s most Vichyite policemen; still another, in trying to improve the deportees’ situation, gets caught up in the same tacitly-collaborationist role as Larcher.

Likewise, the show’s Communists come across better than the show’s Fascists, certainly, but they are often less personally sympathetic than some of the non-resisters — priggish and fanatical, slavishly obedient to the party line, with their own obvious tendency toward authoritarianism. Dr. Larcher’s Communist brother, Marcel (Fabrizio Rongione), is one of the best of them, but still off-putting in his utopian zeal, his ideological chilliness, his neglect of his obligations toward his little boy. (Late in the story the show lets him address that now-teenage son with a stirring and self-justifying speech about the workers’ struggle, but at a rally with pictures of Lenin and Stalin prominently displayed — so you can draw your own conclusions.)

Meanwhile the story doesn’t just inspire sympathy for people caught between collaboration and resistance, or the people who come to the right position extremely late; it also clearly asks you to remain personally invested in precisely the characters whom Oren describes as “sociopathic” and “sadistic,” to see their humanity unto the bitter end. The Vichyite cop with the Jewish girlfriend, for instance — Jean Marchetti, played by Nicholas Gob — commits a series of objectively unforgivable crimes against both Jews and the Resistance, but he is presented throughout as a deeply weird and wounded figure, an orphan boy turned damaged adult, with the line between good and evil running right down the middle of his tortured heart. Or again, the fussy local sub-prefect, the aply-named Servier (Cyril Couton), is a more unstinting collaborator than Larcher and in certain ways the model of the banal style of evil — someone who, without ideology of his own, consistently places bureaucratic loyalties above moral considerations. Yet by the end, facing post-war justice, he achieves a strange and powerful sort of pathos, clearly feeling the weight of a guilt that his life and training haven’t given him the capacity to understand or process.

Indeed I’m almost sympathetic to a critique of the show that would take the opposite tack from Oren’s and argue that it sometimes goes too far in this humanization — particularly in the case of its main Nazi, Heinrich Müller (Richard Sammel), a Gestapo man introduced as the vicious and terrifying antagonist who becomes with time sufficiently charming and charismatic and magnetic that you end up half-rooting for his survival and escape. There is a method to this development, since Müller needs that charisma to make it plausible that one of the key Villeneuvian characters would throw over her whole life for the sake of a love affair with him. (Though this being a very French show adultery of all kinds is a commonplace.) But Sammel’s scene-stealing performance and a script that gives him many of the best lines take us into somewhat dicey territory, where the character’s sophistication, his not-like-the-other-Nazis philosophical detachment, his world-weary disdain for the varieties of French collaboration, all combine to tempt the audience to forgive or forget his mostly-offstage atrocities — which are not just acts of bureaucratic participation in the Nazi order, but full and direct participation in mass murder.

That temptation is the classic Nietzschean seduction: We are invited to prefer Heinrich, with his austere and ruthless amorality, his sense of cool amusement at the situation, to the flailing French, who do the wrong thing out of mixed motives or stupid bigotries or rank self-interest. But in fact the very detachment and ironic distance that make the SS man more attractive than, say, a bumptious Petainist, also make him worse. Whereas the rest of the characters are more deserving of their humanization, and of our sympathy, because they don’t see the world with ironic, cruelty clarity. They collaborate because their sights are limited, because they don’t fully understand the events happening around them, because they can’t see past their ingrained prejudices, because they’re fearful and self-interested and weak. Because they’re like most of us, most human beings in most times and places — decent and well-meaning enough amid conditions of normalcy and peace, but with sins and fallibilities that leave them terribly unready for the test.