The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)
Emile Coulaudon: Self, Former Head of the Auvergne Maquis
Quotes
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Self - Former Head of the Auvergne Maquis : One thing I find appalling is when people who were Pétain supporters come up to me and tell me what they did for the Resistance. Sometimes it's unreal. "Oh, Mr. Gaspard, if only you knew what we did, what I did for the Resistance." Go ahead, pal, tell me all about it. I try to stay calm. I'm a salesman, and I want to sell my product. The company doesn't pay me to do politics and pick fights, so sometimes I find myself obliged to listen to a song and dance of some guy who shows me a drawer and gets his wife to confirm that there was indeed a revolver in that drawer during the war, a revolver which he was supposedly ready to use on the Germans. Only he never actually used it. History doesn't lie.
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Self - Former Head of the Auvergne Maquis : I believe there's a risk that either Nazism will re-emerge, or some form of Nazism under a different name. A rose by any other name is still a rose.
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Emile Coulaudon : My friends would ask me why I joined the Resistance. Why? Because going into a restaurant and seeing Germans at a table, and being told there's only 4 steaks left for the Germans and none for us was extremely frustrating, seeing as that steak came from our cows in Auvergne. So it's our right to eat it, not give it away. That's my first reason. My second reason was that the Germans were forever imposing curfews. It was, after all, a Nazi regime, a totalitarian regime, no matter how you look at it. It was worth fighting for, it was even worth dying for, rather than to live as slaves. Hence, the Resistance.
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Self - Former Mayor of Combronde : There's one thing we often tend to forget. The Germans were Nazis. Fine. But were the French any better than the Nazis? I had a woman shot, a 60 year old woman who had sold me to the Gestapo. She sold me for money. So did my son. For 30 pieces of silver.
Self - Former Head of the Auvergne Maquis : The people in Auvergne, in a county where we failed, like in Brittany, Vercors or anywhere else, who wanted to find the Resistance had no problem finding it, if that person really wanted to fight, or even to fight in the underground without necessarily going all out.
