Storying the archive of war

Abstract

This article situates Margaret's early doctoral research, resulting in the seminal study ‘Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and narrative forms, 1940–1950’, within the 1970s/1980s context of Resistance historical scholarship in which she was working, a scholarship dominated by the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (the predecessor, 1951–1979, of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent). The conception, methodology and gendered ownership of the Resistance historiography established by the Comité are reviewed in order to indicate ways in which Margaret's work represented a forceful critique of their notions of Resistance history and historical truth. In doing this, the article reflects on the nature of archives – the first archives on the French Resistance collected immediately after the war when there was little or no official material to hand; oppositional archives like Margaret's developed to contest contemporary historiography, and finally some of the implications of the digitised turn in archives for our understanding of ourselves as researchers.