‘We swept
a lot under the carpet’: Vichy regime film hits home in France of 2026
Movie
about Nazi-collaborating administration strikes chord during what director
calls ‘time of great uncertainty’
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Sat 3 Oct
2026 06.00 CEST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/03/french-film-notre-salut-vichy-regime
It is the
story of how a lowly state administrator unthinkingly becomes a cog in the
machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of
sending people to their deaths – and it is drawing in audiences to French
cinemas.
The
French film Notre
Salut (Our Salvation), with its modern lighting, improvised scenes and
anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack, is far from the standard historical
costume drama about the second world war.
But the
award-winning film about the daily lives of ordinary people participating in
the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis – and ensured the
deportation of a quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps –
is poised to become a box office hit.
Rounding
up of Jewish people in Paris in May 1941. Photograph: LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty
Images
The film,
which has been given the English-language title A Man of His Time, had a strong
cinema opening in France this week, particularly among young audiences, at a
time when the country is soul-searching ahead of next spring’s presidential
election.
Marine Le Pen of the
far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) continues to top the polls for
the presidential race despite the political fallout from an investigation by Mediapart
alleging that her party leader, Jordan
Bardella, published antisemitic comments as a young party member, which he
denies.
Notre
Salut comes amid a boom in films about France during the second world war,
including more than 5m ticket sales for the two-part biopic of Charles
de Gaulle, as well the controversial Les
Rayons et les Ombres about the press baron and Nazi collaborator Jean
Luchaire, and the forthcoming Moulin,
about the last days of the French resistance leader Jean Moulin.
A scene
from Notre Salut. The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by
director Emmanuel Marre that shed light on the life of his great-grandfather, a
Vichy administrator. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
But
rather than tackling well-known heroes or monsters, Notre Salut focuses instead
on the role of ordinary people in the Vichy regime that, under Marshal
Philippe Pétain, collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to
Nazi concentration camps.
The film
was inspired by a stash of family letters found by its writer and director,
Emmanuel Marre, that gave insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri
Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime.
“There
are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the
second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground, and that is what is
interesting about this film,” said Marc Olivier Baruch, a historian and
specialist on state administrators in the Vichy regime.
Jewish
deportees in the Drancy transit camp in France during the second world war.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
For
Baruch, the most chilling scene in the film is the bureaucratic nitpicking
about the costs incurred by providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and
chamber pots. The central character in the film, the administrator Henri Marre,
“never chooses to reflect on things or look at what he’s doing, to wonder what
his room for manoeuvre is”.
Baruch
said the film’s sense of unease was a pull for modern of audiences because
today France was “in a time
of great uncertainty … There’s a strong lack of confidence among French
people in their elites and in their state and that has been going on for a long
time.”
A notice
in a restaurant window banning Jews from entering, German-occupied Paris, July
1940. Photograph: Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images
He said
the Vichy regime had resonance today as a period in history. “The Pétain
dictatorship is the only moment when the far right was in power since 1820.
There were these four years at the heart of the 20th century when the far right
was in power and clearly for French people in 2026 and 2027 that is interesting
… There has been a certain unease in modern France that it would be better to
stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, stop the masochism [of
looking back]. That of course is stupid, and not possible.”
Film
critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise
of the far right across Europe
and in France.
Henry
Rousso, a historian who has studied the place of the Vichy regime in collective
memory, wrote of the film in Le
Monde: “The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the
Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what [the
RN] is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic
and republican values led to disaster.”
Emmanuel
Marre won the screenplay prize for Notre Salut at the 2026 Cannes film
festival. Photograph: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy
Emmanuel
Marre, the film’s writer-director, who won the best Screenplay prize at the
Cannes film festival, began working on the story more than a decade ago after
the discovery of the letters from his great-grandfather that his family had
kept in a drawer.
He told
France Inter radio: “There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France … there
is a phantom memory of the collaboration. With this film, we wanted to prise
open those drawers and allow all families to look at that – not as
flagellation, [but] because after the war France pushed a lot of it under the
carpet to survive.”
He said
it was crucial to look at the nuance of what led people to collaborate or take
a stand. “In between resistance and in collaboration, there is a whole range of
human emotions, even the most ambiguous.”
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