The French Resistance was a collection of groups that fought the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationist Vichy régime in France during the Second World War. Resistance cells were small groups of armed men and women who conducted guerrilla warfare and published underground newspapers. They also provided first-hand intelligence information, and escape networks that helped Allied soldiers and airmen trapped behind Axis lines. The Resistance's men and women came from many parts of French society, including émigrés, academics, students, aristocrats, conservative Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, liberals, anarchists, communists, and some fascists. The proportion of French people who participated in organized resistance has been estimated at from one to three percent of the total population.
Maurice Papon was a French civil servant and Nazi collaborator who was convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the occupation of France. Papon led the police in major prefectures from the 1930s to the 1960s, before he became a Gaullist politician. When he was secretary general for the police in Bordeaux during World War II, he participated in the deportation of more than 1,600 Jews. He is also known for his activities in the Algerian War (1954–1962), during which he tortured insurgent prisoners as prefect of the Constantinois department, and ordered, as prefect of the Paris police, the deadly repression of a pro-National Liberation Front (FLN) demonstration against a curfew that he had "advised".
Norman Frederick Jewison was a Canadian filmmaker. He was known for directing films which addressed topical social and political issues, often making controversial or complicated subjects accessible to mainstream audiences. Among numerous other accolades, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director three times in three separate decades, for In the Heat of the Night (1967), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), and Moonstruck (1987). He was nominated for an additional four Oscars, three Golden Globe Awards, and a Primetime Emmy Award, and won a BAFTA Award. He received the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1999.
Paul Claude Marie Touvier was a French Nazi collaborator during World War II in Occupied France. In 1994, he became the first Frenchman ever convicted of crimes against humanity, for his participation in the Holocaust under Vichy France.
The Hurricane is a 1999 American biographical sports drama film directed and produced by Norman Jewison. The film stars Denzel Washington as Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter, a former middleweight boxer who was wrongly convicted for a triple murder in a bar in Paterson, New Jersey. The script was adapted by Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon from Carter's 1974 autobiography The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender To 45472 and the 1991 non-fiction work Lazarus and the Hurricane: The Freeing of Rubin "The Hurricane" Carter by Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton.
Charles-Marie-Photius Maurras was a French author, politician, poet, and critic. He was an organizer and principal philosopher of Action Française, a political movement that is monarchist, anti-parliamentarist, and counter-revolutionary. Maurras also held anti-communist, anti-Masonic, anti-Protestant, and antisemitic views, while being highly critical of Nazism, referring to it as "stupidity". His ideas greatly influenced National Catholicism and integral nationalism, led by his tenet that "a true nationalist places his country above everything".
The Milice française, generally called la Milice, was a political paramilitary organization created on 30 January 1943 by the Vichy régime to help fight against the French Resistance during World War II. The Milice's formal head was Vichy France's Prime Minister Pierre Laval, although its chief of operations and de facto leader was Secretary General Joseph Darnand. The Milice participated in summary executions and assassinations, helping to round up Jews and résistants in France for deportation. It was the successor to Darnand's Service d'ordre légionnaire (SOL) militia. The Milice was the Vichy régime's most extreme manifestation of fascism. Ultimately, Darnand envisaged the Milice as a fascist single-party political movement for the French State.
Katherine Matilda Swinton is a British actress. Known for her roles in independent films and blockbusters, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.
Serge Klarsfeld is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notable efforts to commemorate the Jewish victims of German-occupied France and has been a supporter of Israel.
Young Adam is a 2003 British erotic drama film written and directed by David Mackenzie and starring Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan, Ewan Stewart and Emily Mortimer. The film is based on the 1954 novel of the same name by Alexander Trocchi.
Caravaggio is a 1986 British historical drama film directed by Derek Jarman. The film is a fictionalised retelling of the life of Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. It is Tilda Swinton's film debut.
Philippe Henriot was a French poet, journalist, politician, and Nazi collaborator who served as a minister in the French government at Vichy, where he directed propaganda broadcasts. He was assassinated by the Résistance in 1944.
Xavier Vallat, French politician and antisemite who was Commissioner-General for Jewish Questions in the wartime collaborationist Vichy government, and was sentenced after World War II to ten years in prison for his part in the persecution of French Jews.
Basch Viktor Vilém, or Victor-Guillaume Basch was a French Jewish politician and professor of germanistics and philosophy at the Sorbonne descending from Hungary. He was engaged in the Zionist movement, in the Ligue des droits de l'homme and in Anti-Nazism.
René Bousquet was a high-ranking French political appointee who served as secretary general to the Vichy French police from May 1942 to 31 December 1943. For personal heroism, he had become a protégé of prominent officials before the war and had risen rapidly in the government.
The Statement (1995) is a thriller novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore. Set in the south of France and Paris in the early 1990s, The Statement is the tale of Pierre Brossard, a former officer in the pro-fascist militia that served Vichy France and a murderer of Jews. The novel was published by Bloomsbury in the United Kingdom in 1995 and by E.P. Dutton in the United States on 1 June 1996.
Vichy France, officially the French State, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
There have been several controversies surrounding the Society of St. Pius X, many of which concern political support for non-democratic regimes, alleged antisemitism, and the occupation of church buildings. The Society of St. Pius X is an international organisation founded in 1970 by the French traditionalist Catholic archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Bernard Ménétrel was a French physician and political advisor to Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. He met with Helmut Knochen and tried to negotiate with Charles de Gaulle on Pétain's behalf.
A Bigger Splash is a 2015 psychological drama film directed by Luca Guadagnino and with a screenplay by David Kajganich from a story by Alain Page. Starring Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes, and Dakota Johnson, the film is loosely based on the 1969 Jacques Deray film La Piscine and named after the 1967 David Hockney painting of the same name. It is the second instalment in Guadagnino's self-described Desire trilogy, following I Am Love (2009) and preceding Call Me by Your Name (2017). It competed for the Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival.
