Visualising previously unpublished historical data: the case of the helpers, with Claire Andrieu

Claire Andrieu, a specialist in the political and social history of the 20th century and a researcher at the Centre d’Histoire de Sciences Po, spent some ten years analysing the behaviour of civilians confronted with exceptional situations, with very different consequences: how civilians on the ground received enemy airmen who came down during the Second World War. Comparing the behaviour of the British, French and German populations gives her research a particular depth.

The Sciences Po Cartography Workshop supported Claire Andrieu throughout her research project, with the backing of Sciences Po’s Scientific Department. The collaboration came to a close with the design and production of the maps and diagrams published in the book Tombés du ciel (“Fallen from the sky”), released by Tallandier in April 2021.

The interview

Patrice Mitrano: In a few words, what does your research contribute to the historiography of the Second World War in general, and to our understanding of civilians’ capacity to play a part in resisting the enemy in particular (you speak of “34,000 unknown soldiers” in France)?

Claire Andrieu: The book’s first contribution is to show that, when confronted with an enemy or a friend, civilians behave like combatants. They are just as much at war as combatants in uniform. For several decades, historiography has focused mainly on victims – people speak of a “victim paradigm” – but this book brings out civilians’ engagement in the war. Being a victim – this war claimed more civilian than military victims – does not rule out fighting engagement.

The book’s other point of interest is to observe how homogeneous or specific behaviour is on a national scale. One might think that civilians, taken individually and caught by surprise by the arrival of an airman, would react in a variety of ways. It turns out that they do not: behaviour is standardised. These individual acts are in fact collective behaviour.

In occupied France, some 34,000 “helpers” of Allied soldiers and airmen were recorded by the British and the Americans after the war. Yet helping the Allies was considered an act of war by the occupier and punished as such, by death or deportation. The escape manuals available to the Allied instructors in charge of “briefing” aircrews stated that in France, the chances of being helped to get back to England were 90%.

Behaviour this widespread – contrary to the occupier’s orders and to the instructions of the Vichy government, and contrary, too, to the interests of the families themselves – calls for an explanation. It reveals a particular combination of the three determinants at work: the political regime in place, the weight of the political culture acquired previously, and the role of collective memory. Clearly, helping the Allies shows a rejection of both the occupation regime and the Vichy regime, continued solidarity with the British and the Americans, and a rejection of the German occupier, which for the third time in a single lifetime was imposing itself as a colonial power on French territory.

These three parameters – regime, culture, memory – account fairly well for the differences observed from one country to another. In Germany, the Nazi regime, nationalist culture and the memory of previous wars came together to trigger the lynching of downed pilots. In England, the democratic regime, the cultural stereotype of humour and the absence of any past invasion ensured calm, and even a degree of goodwill, among the British towards downed German pilots.

Patrice Mitrano: Your work puts into perspective the behaviour of civilians at four different moments, in three distinct countries. What sources did you draw on? How did you extract and prepare the information the Cartography Workshop team needed?

Claire Andrieu: The study rests on high-quality sources: contemporary with or close to the events, produced in a fact-checking framework, and serial. For France, these are first of all the “debriefings” of Allied soldiers and airmen who managed to get back to England. They were questioned as soon as they arrived about their journey and the help they had received. Then there are the procedures by which the Allies recognised the “helpers”, carried out from 1944 to 1947. For Germany, the sources are the post-war trials held in the occupation zones for war crimes (assaulting a prisoner of war has been a crime under international law since 1899). For the United Kingdom, since airmen were received on the ground in a relatively peaceful manner, this did not give rise to any specific sources. It is by studying the press that the nature of people’s behaviour can be inferred.

The serial nature of the sources immediately gave me the idea of producing statistics and maps. But first, databases had to be built. This stage is not straightforward, because the aim pursued has to be matched to the potential of the raw material (the archives) and to the capabilities of cartographic techniques. So it was a joint effort that began with the Sciences Po Cartography Workshop and developed over several years. The dialogue with the cartographers, notably Patrice Mitrano and Thomas Ansart, was essential in this phase of the research. Every document, map or chart that appears in the book was conceived jointly. One could say that the implementation was “co-designed”.

Patrice Mitrano: You deliberately placed visualisation among other exploratory analysis tools in your research. Is that rather unusual, or is it shared – and indispensable – among historians today?

Claire Andrieu: Why try to visualise a phenomenon? It is a simple way (albeit a long one to build!) of getting to the essentials – and, from there, of raising new questions. For example, if we say there were 34,000 helpers in France, we do not know whether that is a few or a lot. But if we place on a map the area of every municipality in which at least one fugitive was helped, the map takes on a particular colouring. The northern half of France is covered with patches that tend to merge. This corresponds to the main flight paths of Allied aircraft. Military or natural obstacles, which required additional help, also stand out. This is the case for the demarcation line, the Pyrenees and the Jura.

Today’s cartography also makes it possible to bring out the chronology: by cross-referencing places of passage with the year of passage, the cartographic work shows the war in six tableaux (1940–1945). We see Europe crossed by the clandestine migration of thousands of young men, from Denmark to Sweden, from Poland or the Netherlands to Spain via France, and from northern Italy to the south or to Switzerland. This “film of events” conveys the European dimension of the phenomenon.

Historians today try more than in the past to map social facts. People speak of a “spatial turn”. Maps are no longer considered a mere “illustration” of the text. They can have demonstrative value and even the capacity to reveal phenomena that had remained unnoticed. They play the role that aerial photographs play in archaeology. Bonaparte said that a good sketch is better than a long speech, but that remark makes the sketch no more than a teaching tool. Yet the sketch is also an instrument of discovery.

Patrice Mitrano: Many original graphic documents accompany your book. How did you connect them to your argument? What was your intention? Was it something your publisher wanted?

Claire Andrieu: By offering the eye a synthesis, charts, like maps, have probative force. This method of presentation shows proportions and change over time. The overview it provides limits the risk of errors of perspective such as overstatement, understatement or hasty generalisation. For example, the chart of the dates on which escapees from the continent arrived in England brings out a twofold phenomenon: the steady influx of soldiers who had been stranded in June 1940, and the far greater speed of escape of downed airmen. One cannot help thinking that the escape courses given to airmen bore fruit.

The editor was a little worried to receive a manuscript with some twenty maps and charts. So, together with the Workshop, we improved the layout, the captions and the placement of these documents throughout the book. The collaboration continued practically until the final proofs.

Patrice Mitrano: What were the Cartography Workshop’s main contributions in supporting your research?

Claire Andrieu: The central contribution of the Cartography Workshop can be analysed in two stages. First, there is the map effect or chart effect. Concentrating and miniaturising thousands of data points into a map or chart produces a reality effect. Instead of creating distance, visual representation heightens the presence of the phenomenon. It turns a scattering of individual wills into a social fact.

The other stage is the analysis of the maps and charts, including comparing them. On the map of Germany, for example, we can see that regions with many lynchings do not always correspond to the most heavily bombed areas. We also see that the tonnage of bombs dropped by the Allies on France in June–August 1944 was three times greater than that dropped on Germany over the same period. Yet in France, the helpers did not ease their efforts, while lynchers multiplied in Germany. These contrasts make it possible to revisit the causal link often drawn between bombing and the lynching of airmen.

Working with the Cartography Workshop team was a great experience. Maps and charts do not merely offer syntheses in miniature; they make it possible to open up new lines of questioning.

Interview kindly given by Claire Andrieu to Patrice Mitrano (Cartography Workshop) – October 2021

Reference

Andrieu, Claire. 2021. Tombés du ciel. Le sort des pilotes abattus en Europe, 1939-1945. Paris, France: Tallandier.