Un village français

A lovely June day in provincial France explodes topsy-turvy into violence under attack by aliens: the mechanized air and ground forces of the German blitzkrieg.

The creators of the French television series Un village français (A French Village) evoke a classic sci-fi alien-invasion movie convention to introduce their compelling, character-driven, seven-season narrative about life in a provincial French town under German occupation during the Second World War.

The German Army arrives in Villeneuve in Un village français (A French Village).

But this series is not just another elaborate costume drama pitting noble civilians against evil Nazis. It is poignant because the characters are people we recognize, who get themselves into situations that most of us know. Only the stakes are higher. The shock of a sudden, violent air attack, invading armored vehicles, and German officers barking orders at French civilians in German-accented French in the opening episode blasts the townspeople’s well-traveled bridge to everyday life. They are stranded on a hostile, alien-controlled island where the least slipup can have dire consequences.

Villeneuve’s mayor (Robin Renucci), chief police inspector (Patrick Descamps), Marchetti (Nicolas Gob), and Schwartz (Thierry Godard) witness the alien landing.

We see in this series and its concluding epilogues that people who experienced the Occupation lived with their conduct and the choices they made for the rest of their lives. The heroes and villains are easy to draw in primary colors from a distance. Yet subtler realities take shape looking into individual hearts and minds, as show creators Frédéric Krivine, Philippe Triboit, Emmanuel Daucé, and their team have done here. They cross the minefield of conflicting narratives of this period by putting two dozen well-developed primary characters and twice that many distinct secondary characters, mostly everyday men, women, and children, in extremely trying circumstances and then letting their characters work through them.

Police Sub-Prefect Servier (Cyril Couton) and Madame Larcher (Audrey Fleurot) collaborate with Major Müller (Richard Sammel) in Un village français (A French Village).

The village is Villeneuve, a fictional generic name roughly equivalent to the American Middletown, in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region. It is in a French département like Jura which during the war was half in the German Occupied Zone and half in unoccupied Vichy territory, and it borders on Switzerland—details which figure in the narrative. Villeneuve is far away from General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile in London and their British, US, and Soviet allies.

Incidental events repeatedly interconnect and touch the lives and activities of diverse characters. In an early sequence, schoolchildren must write a letter to France’s fascist figurehead Marshal Philippe Pétain. A boy produces the kind of ingenuously charming screed that teachers and parents everywhere will recognize. The letter amuses the boy’s distracted father, brother of the mayor and a regime opponent, who tells his son to rewrite it because of his poor penmanship. The boy inadvertently copies his letter on the back of a controversial anti-German flyer, central to the episode, which his father had a hand in printing and distributing.

‘Sergeant Kurt’ (Samuel Theis) and schoolmistress Lucienne (Marie Kremer) at school.

The school principal beams as the class reads its letters aloud to a French regime education inspector. A German sergeant attends the event to promote community friendship; he also has his eye on the schoolmistress. The sergeant and the schoolmistress simultaneously see “LES BOCHES DEHORS!!!” (KRAUTS OUT!!!) on back of the boy’s letter while he reads it. The schoolmistress is panic-stricken. The official praises the letter and asks to see it. The sergeant takes the letter from the boy, crumples it and burns it in the room’s heating stove. The official registers that the German is offended; he concedes a need for “better vigilance”. The sergeant’s peremptory act reinforces the principal’s and schoolchildren’s negative feelings about Germans. And the incident connects the entire community.

Gaston (Maxim Driesen) reads his 11 November letter to Le Maréchal in class. 

The casting is extraordinary. An introduction to a handful of characters hints at the shape this epic takes.

Dr. and Mme. Larcher (Robin Renucci and Audrey Fleurot) in the doctor’s study.

Dr. Daniel Larcher (Robin Renucci) is an affluent family doctor and ethical humanist. His wife Hortense (Audrey Fleurot) is a latter-day Emma Bovary, a beautiful and indulged fantasist attracted to intense men. Occupation authorities appoint Dr. Larcher mayor of Villeneuve. He accepts, believing that he can administer palliatives to the Germans while vaccinating his fellow townspeople from the politics.

Mr. and Mme. Schwartz (Thierry Godard and Emmanuelle Bach) discuss business prospects.

Raymond Schwartz (Thierry Godard) is a nonpolitical businessman who relishes the good life. He runs a sawmill owned by his father-in-law, a wealthy right-wing Paris insider. Both Raymond and his wife Jeannine (Emmanuelle Bach) see an upside in all the business the Germans bring. Raymond also admires the capable Marie Germain (Nade Dieu), one of his father-in-law’s tenant farmers, whose husband is a prisoner of war in Germany. Marie runs the farm where she lives with two teenaged sons.

Marie Germain (Nade Dieu) operates a family farm.

Jules Bériot (François Loriquet) succeeds Madame Morhange (Nathalie Cerda) as school principal after she is removed from her post because she is Jewish. The pleasant, middle-aged Bériot shares teaching duties with Lucienne Borderie (Marie Kremer), a young schoolmistress who has a secret love affair with Kurt Wagner (Samuel Theis), a German soldier.

Max (Yann Govan), Marcel (Fabrizio Rongione), Suzanne (Constance Dollé), and Edmond (Antoine Mathieu) among comrades.

Dr. Larcher’s brother Marcel (Fabrizio Rongione) is a dedicated communist who works at the sawmill, a widower with an adolescent son Gaston (Maxim Driesen). Marcel must balance his doctrinaire Stalinist party leader Edmond (Antoine Mathieu) and his girlfriend Suzanne Richard (Constance Dollé), a socialist postal worker his comrades distrust, who throws in with the communists when they begin to resist the occupiers. Gaston and the other children age naturally in the series and their characters show the direct effect of the war on children; several return in the series epilogue as middle-aged adults played by different actors.

Sub-Prefect Servier (Cyril Couton), a dedicated career bureaucrat; the avuncular Chief Inspector Henri De Kervern (Patrick Descamps); the hardnosed, right-wing Jean Marchetti (Nicolas Gob) and fallible Loriot (Olivier Soler) navigate the tricky territory of law enforcement and meeting the Germans’ requirements while living among people most of them have known all their lives.

Death’s head: Heinrich Müller (Richard Sammel), a charming, alarming blond SD major.

Key among the German overlords is Heinrich Müller (Richard Sammel), a charming but intense elitist SD major, morphine-addicted from a First World War injury, who has firsthand population-control experience acquired on the German Eastern Front in Poland and Ukraine.

This brief list barely scratches the surface. The dire circumstances bring out the best and worst in people; many characters’ roles change as war progresses. The famous Résistance is portrayed as doughty but outnumbered, outclassed, and outgunned by trained military and intelligence personnel. Its operators acquire skill at a high cost; its greatest effect may be on locals, especially as the war winds down. Jews, a central focus of fascist policy, play less central roles than the fired school principal. Law enforcement sweep up a number of them scattered in the region such as Rita de Witte (Axelle Maricq), a Belgian Jew with good survival instincts.

Odd bedfellows: Marchetti (Nicolas Gob) and Rita (Axelle Maricq) make their break.

Given the influence of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, we were surprised that no religious figure has a larger part in a story. Several curés turn up in the margins; one has a tangential personal role in a later season.

With limited resources and less outside help, Villeneuve’s people cope the best they can on their own to get by and protect their loved ones in difficult circumstances. Though set in a specific time and place, the point of retelling this story is to remind us that these things happened before, are happening now, and can happen again. These people could be us.  

No good deed goes unpunished: ex-Mayor Larcher (Robin Renucci) in the dock.

Un village français (A French Village) 2009-2017 France. France 3/MHz. Creators: Frédéric Krivine, Philippe Triboit, Emmanuel Daucé.