Review of Alphonse Boudard's "The Devil-May-Care Fighters" about the occupation of WWII Paris

This is a book that should immediately be translated into English, preferably by a translator who has a good command of mid-20th century "argot", Parisian street talk. I decided to buy it as the result of reading a recent French book titled "Ainsi finissent les salauds", about the clandestine kidnappings and executions that took place in the first couple of months after the WWII liberation of occupied Paris. Boudard's novel "Les combattants du petit bonheur", published in 1977, was quoted at the beginning of many chapters of "Ainsi finissent les salauds". I see on the author's very brief Wikipedia page that the book's title is translated into English as "The Fighters of Haphazard", but it would be more accurate to translate it as "The Makeshift Fighters" or "The Devil-May-Care Fighters".




The book is presented as a novel, but it soon becomes clear that it's a work of autobiography, with most of the names changed. Alphonse Boudard tells of his adolescence in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, during the German occupation. He lived near the Place d'Italie with his grandmother, in a street full of very poor, but fairly contented people, with limited horizons and shabby clothes. Their lives revolved around life and gossip in their community, work--whenever they could get it, a slap-up meal from time to time and the conversation in the street cafés. At that time, a working class Parisian's street was his whole world and he rarely ventured outside it. The working class area where Boudard lived was strongly communist, but personally he couldn't give a damn about politics, or anything else whose truth he couldn't check out from his own experience.




His main preoccupation, throughout the novel, is sex and the fact that he isn't getting enough of it, apart from a few standup sessions in doorways with a female colleague whose boyfriend has been forced into labor in Germany and who, Boudard surmises, is probably honoring the German woman whose husband is off fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front. Boudard's political persuasion of the moment depends on the girl he is chasing, as he makes clear in a subsequent novel, "Le café du bonheur--Poor People's Coffee" (a Paris slang expression for making love, because it was the only sort of luxury the penniless could offer themselves).




Whether the girl Boudard wanted to bed was a Communist, Trotskyist, Catholic, a Judge's daughter, wife or whatever, Boudard would go along with her beliefs until he bedded her, and then revert to the usual anti-clerical and anti-political stance favored by working-class Parisians of old: distrustful of any educated barker, preferring to believe what they could hear and see with their own two ears and eyes. In "Poor People's Coffee" Boudard wrote a sentence that still makes me laugh out loud every time I think of it: "This isn't about principles. I don't have any."




Boudard's father left his mother soon after he'd made her pregnant at the age of 17. His mother is rarely mentioned. She doesn't live with him and his grandmother, and he makes clear, from the way he describes her whenever she does pop into their lives for a few minutes, after months' of absence, that she probably makes her living as a prostitute.  After the French capitulation in June 1940, Boudard tried to leave Paris by bike, with a group of friends. But they only got as far as Orleans before they had to turn around and head back for Paris.




The winters of the occupation were deadly: the cold and the vermin, combined with lack of food and basic amenities, killed off many poor Parisians. Boudard was an honest juvenile delinquent. He saw himself as only fighting for survival, and he would never play a dirty trick on a member of his own gang of friends or one of the older people in the area. His first theft from the Germans, a bicycle, was stolen from him a few hours later, by the 21 year old elder brother of one of his friends, who was notorious for making love to a woman grocery shop keeper three times his age, so that he could get his hands on black market food.




Boudard worked as an apprentice type-setter in a printing works. There he met the men who enrolled him in the resistance. He left Paris with a friend of his own age to join a group of resistants in the countryside, but lost his way and arrived late at the meeting point, a remote farm. Struggling through the woodlands to get to the farmhouse, Boudard and his friend heard volleys of shots. A man comes rushing towards them and takes them to hide in his house. The forty young men they were going to join up with had been massacred by the Nazis and the French Militia. Boudard and his friends dug holes in the ground, covered themselves with branches and leaves and hid out until the Militia stopped searching the woods. 




He participated in an attack against the Germans, managed to seize some of their arms, and then headed back to Paris, where he engaged in clandestine activities until his unit of the Free French Fighters, which was made up of friends from his gang, was given the task of liberating a part of the Latin Quarter.  Far from the glorious story about the French resistance fighters made up after the Libération, Boudard wrote honestly about the shambles that he found instead of a disciplined fighting force. If the Germans hadn't already decided to leave, there was no way the makeshift fighters would have managed to dislodge them. As more and more opportunists joined the FFI to exact revenge on their neighbors, kill collaborators--many of whom were subsequently proven to be innocent, and steal what they could, the resistance movement in Paris was increasingly in danger of becoming an out and out shambles.




Boudard describes how young men from a rival gang, barely out of their twenties, join the Petainist and, ultimately, pro-Nazi French Militia. He mentions frequently in the "novel" that it was only by luck that he wasn't forced to join the Militia himself. 




One of the young Militia men from the other gang, Stéphane, who had gone to primary school with Alphonse, is "miraculously"--writes a skeptical Boudard, transformed into a leading figure in the Resistance movement in the first days of the Libération. In Fresnes prison in 1948, Boudard meets Stéphane's best friend, who had stayed with the Militia to the bitter end, and been found guilty of collaboration, and of torturing and killing members of the resistance movement. He was waiting to be taken out and shot at dawn. In spite of everything the Militia had done, Boudard couldn't find it in himself to hate the man, because he knew how close he'd come to being in his shoes instead of his own.




Towards the end of the novel, he gives details of of how "resistants" who had come late to the game dragged women out into the streets, stripped off their clothes, cut off their hair and branded them for sleeping with Germans during the occupation. He also mentions the renegade communists who became as bad as the Nazis, when they transformed the Dental Center in the Avenue de Choisy into a torture and killing center. The book "Ainsi finissent les salauds" researched some of the illegal killings committed after the Liberation, and confirms the events Alphonse Boudard describes in his novel, although, with the benefit of hindsight, it fills in details that Boudard couldn't have known at the time.




When Boudard met the Militia man waiting to be executed, he was himself being held in the prison for petty crimes committed after being demobilized from the French Army, which he had joined soon after liberating the Place Saint-Michel with the small group of buddies he'd recruited to fight with the  French Forces of the Interior (FFI). He spent a good part of the next 15 years in Prison, where he began to read to counteract the boredom, and then to write. His first novels were published at the beginning of the 1960s and found immediate success in France, although many of them are now out of print.




The novel ends on a sad note. The beautiful young judge's daughter with whom Boudard falls in love at first sight, when he is installed in a fifth-floor apartment, from which to rain down Molotov cocktails and machine gun fire on German trucks and tanks entering the Place Saint-Michel, at first flirts with him but then spurns his advances. When the men of General Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division, and the clean, healthy and handsome young American soldiers finally enter Paris, she leaves behind her the 19 year old, unwashed and unsophisticated French street fighter and, accompanied by her beautiful mother, dances and screws the night away with the real liberators.