The Weeping Frenchman: the Emotion of National Loss
In the wake of Trump’s victory, many of his opponents posted images of disbelief, shock, and betrayal on social media. The people who are posting these kinds of images are obviously in despair over what will happen to the United States in the next four years and possibly longer than that.
One of those images struck me very forcefully, mainly because it’s an image that I’ve often used when teaching about the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. Most of you will have seen it (and, of course, it’s the picture we’re using for the blog post for this episode and in our social media posts promoting it). Known as “The Weeping Frenchman,” it’s usually described as depicting a Frenchman crying as he watched German soldiers march into Paris. I’ve been teaching about World War II since, roughly, the war ended in 1945, and that’s what I used to tell my students. So I fully expected to tell that story (with all its tragedy) in this short episode, and try to explain why I thought that people were using that specific image in November 2024.
Well, you’d think I’d have learned by now, having done this myth-busting show for almost ten years, that most of the history stories we take at purely face value (you know, the ones we’ve been “told” by somebody and not bothered to investigate) are false, more often than not. Such is the case with The Weeping Frenchman. When I started looking into it, I sort of assumed that the true story wouldn’t be as forceful and emotional as we’ve been told. It could have been a man crying at almost anything, and was probably taken out of context by subsequent generations to show French despair at the Nazi takeover. The truth story, I began to think, is probably less emotional and more pedestrian than we all have believed.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The real story behind The Weeping Frenchman photograph is actually more emotional and more tragic than I had “known.” The fall of Paris on the 14th of June 1940 was devastating for French morale, but Parisians weren’t on the streets as the Nazis rolled in. If you watch the newsreels from that day, you’ll see that the streets were more or less empty. Parisians, no doubt, wanted to stay inside and not witness what they saw as an invasion of probably the most civilized place in the world at that time. So the Frenchman depicted wasn’t weeping on the streets of Paris as the barbarian Nazis swept in.
The image actually comes from a film clip, which was used by, among other people, the famous American director, Frank Capra, in his “Why We Fight” documentary/propaganda films. These short films were designed to explain some of the war’s events to American soldiers (and the broader public), but they were also intended to motivate them to support the war effort. The third film in the “Why We Fight” series was entitled “Divide and Conquer.” After explaining the German invasion of north-eastern France and how the Nazis then moved west and south in an attempt to conquer the whole country, the film showed a truly devastating emotional scene.
French regimental army standards, the flags and colors carried by important army divisions, were, in the old days, flown at the head of French armies, and were very glorious. The French, as is so often forgotten these days, were a highly militaristic people, and French armies were held in very high esteem by the French public. After World War I, these regimental standards were generally considered ornamental and ceremonial. But they were revered nonetheless. As the Nazis swept across France in the summer of 1940, those regimental standards had to be evacuated, eventually to Marseille on the southern coast. If Hitler’s armies had captured those symbols, it would have been a major blow to the psyche of the French people.
Here’s how the The Weeping Frenchman story unfolded.
When it became obvious that the French military could not recover and push the Nazis back, and as the German army was moving ever closer to Marseille, the French military and government decided to send those regimental standards to their colonial possessions in North Africa for safekeeping. The French government then decided to march those standards through the main streets of Marseille on their way to the ships. And they did this in public deliberately. They were trying to convey the message that they were not giving up, and that they were preserving French ideals (as symbolized by those regimental standards) by sending them overseas until France itself could be liberated.
French cameraman Georges Mejat, working for Fox MovieTone News, filmed the procession, but also shot footage of the reactions of the people watching it. In that film clip you see the Frenchman, who has been identified as Jerôme Barzetti, weeping as those regimental standards left their rightful home. It’s a brief clip (and I’ve put a couple of links to where you can see it in the blog post for this episode), but if you look closely at the left side of the screen, you can see perhaps an image that is even more moving. To the Weeping Frenchman’s right, and a little behind him, there’s a woman weeping and clapping as the standards are marched by. That woman, to my mind, is applauding to show her support of the beliefs that those regimental standards represented. Yet, along with Jerôme Barzetti, she’s weeping at the same time as she’s clapping. Those two emotions, believing in French ideals and applauding them, and crying that those ideals have to be preserved elsewhere, I think, make her reaction all the more significant for historians and people trying to understand what happened in France and how it affected many French people. I wish I knew her name. I tried, but I couldn’t find it.
For Americans, the closest comparison to this scene that I can think of would be this. Imagine the country was attacked and invaded by a brutal and overwhelming foreign power. And in order to save lives, the United States government had to surrender. One of the things that the government would probably do, before Washington DC itself fell to the invaders, would be to get the original copies of The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, which are housed in the National Archives, and take them somewhere on the globe where they would be safe. And in order to show the magnitude of this event, and show the commitment to preserving the original manifestations of American political culture, the government might indeed hold a public procession of these documents being taken away in an attempt to secure their survival. You see, despite the fact that there are innumerable copies of The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, the connection that American people have always made between the true originals and the ideals they contained, is undeniable.
I’m sure that Americans would line the streets to watch them being taken away for safekeeping, and that they would show the same emotions that The Weeping Frenchman and the woman next to him displayed that day in September 1940 in Marseille. And the danger of losing our Republic as we have seen in recent events, makes it perfectly understandable why Americans in 2024 went out of their way to find this 84-year-old foreign image, and why they have used it to show their dismay at what indeed might happen here.
As I said at the end of the previous episode where I talked about preserving the “Republic” part of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The only way that can be done is by insisting that our Republic not be forgotten, and by never letting any force try to extinguish it. So let me end this episode by asking you to do one thing. Go watch the famous scene in the Hollywood classic, “Casablanca,” when the German soldiers are at a corner table, drunkenly singing one of their triumphal songs in Rick’s Cafe. You’ll remember that the true hero of that film, Victor Lazlo, outraged at this Nazi bombast, goes over to the bandstand and insists that the Rick’s Cafe’s house band play “La Marseillaise.” Remember what he says – “play La Marseillaise.” And when they hesitate, he insists, “play it!” They play it, the French people in the cafe are moved, start singing quietly, and then build up to sing it loudly and forcefully. Eventually, the singing Nazis are drowned out and have to sit down.
And Americans right now must take every opportunity we have to do exactly that — speak loudly and forcefully that our Republic must never be overrun by barbarians.
Talk to you next time.
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Check out these videos:
“Divide and Conquer,” Chapter III of Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight.” The Fall of France starts at 48:25 and goes to 56:22. The specific withdrawl of the regimental standards is shows from 54:23-55:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Foiim649Wh0
“The Weeping Frenchman” clip from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frenchmanweeps1940.ogv
A good explanatory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2JXNznIlR4
The scene from Casablanca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ZM3CpDd7o
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Buzzkill Bookshelf:
Hanna Diamond, Fleeing Hitler: France 1940
As Hitler’s victorious armies approached Paris, panic gripped the city and the roads heading south filled with millions of French citizens, fleeing for their lives, with scant supplies and often no destination in mind. All hoped, as famed author Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her diary, “not to be taken like a rat in Occupied Paris.”
In Fleeing Hitler, historian Hanna Diamond paints a gripping picture of the harrowing escape from Paris, highlighting the hardships people suffered in their desperate flight, and underscoring the impact this exodus had on life under Vichy rule. Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Diamond shows how this ordeal became for civilians and soldiers alike the defining experience of the war. She tells how, in the Paris region alone, close to four million people left their homes and fled south, swelling the numbers of refugees until is was impossible to direct the flow of humanity. The result was total chaos with an enormous price to pay in terms of human misery and suffering. Many lost their lives as this vast caravan of predominantly women, children, and the elderly faced truly harsh conditions, and even starvation. Then, after the German offer of peace, as the traumatized population returned home, preoccupied by the desire for safety and bewildered by the unexpected turn of events, they put their faith in Marshall Pétain who was able to establish his collaborative Vichy regime largely unopposed, while the Germans consolidated their occupation.
The first time this important story has been told in English, Fleeing Hitler captures in moving detail the devastating flight and early days of occupation after the fall of France.
Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940.
On 16 May 1940 an emergency meeting of the French High Command was called at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. The German army had broken through the French lines on the River Meuse at Sedan and elsewhere, only five days after launching their attack. Churchill, who had been telephoned by Prime Minister Reynaud the previous evening to be told that the French were beaten, rushed to Paris to meet the French leaders. The mood in the meeting was one of panic and despair; there was talk of evacuating Paris. Churchill asked Gamelin, the French Commander in Chief, ‘Where is the strategic reserve?’ ‘There is none,’ replied Gamelin.
This exciting book by Julian Jackson, a leading historian of twentieth-century France, charts the breathtakingly rapid events that led to the defeat and surrender of one of the greatest bastions of the Western Allies, and thus to a dramatic new phase of the Second World War. The search for scapegoats for the most humiliating military disaster in French history began almost at once: were miscalculations by military leaders to blame, or was this an indictment of an entire nation?
Using eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and diaries, Julian Jackson recreates, in gripping detail, the intense atmosphere and dramatic events of these six weeks in 1940, unravelling the historical evidence to produce a fresh answer to the perennial question of whether the fall of France was inevitable.
