88. Jérôme Blachon Collects and Transmits Precious Memories at the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
During World War II, a Nazi collbatoring regime governed the south of France, and the city of Toulouse was a Resistance hub. The Vichy Government promoted anti-Semitism and collaborated with the Nazis, most specifically by deporting Jews to concentration and extermination camps. Fragmented Resistance fighters organized to form escape networks and build logistics chains to sabotage and disrupt the regime.
In 1977, former Resistance members created a community museum in Toulouse about their experience. Today, that museum is called the Museum of Resistance and Deportation in Haute-Garonne, France, and is run by the regional government. Museum director Jérôme Blachon is reimagining how the museum tells the story of the French Resistance as the people who experienced firsthand pass away.
In this episode, Blachon describes the challenge of presenting the fragmented nature of the resistance to a modern audience, the 2020 renovation of the museum, and his focus on transmitting precious memories.
“Today, this type of museum has a new dimension with the disappearance of the last witnesses, since they can no longer testify in front of students, scholars and the general public. So it is our mission to transmit this memory.” - Jérôme Blachon
Gallery Continues ⏭️
When it comes to the people fighting the Nazi occupation—the Resistance—it’s tempting to present history like a story, with clear-cut intentions and a simple narrative. But these histories are anything but simple, and looked different in every country.
In episode 51 of this program, we examine another collaborationist regime: Bulgaria in the early 1940s by visiting the Sofia Jewish Museum of History. Today, one of the galleries is named The Holocaust and the Rescue of the Jews in Bulgaria, which even the museum staff say is an overly simplistic title.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿The Da Vinci Code (2006)
The security cameras at the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, are fake because real ones are too expensive. That's what we learn in the first scenes of 2006's The Da Vinci Code, and the lack of coordinated security becomes a problem when a man is murdered in one of the museum's galleries. So it's up to professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to visit the museum and decipher clues to identify the murder. In the process, he discovers a secret religious cabal and explains a lot of things to a lot of people.
Friend and fellow podcaster Hannah Hethmon, who was forbidden from watching this movie as a teenager, joins me to talk about the lack of front-of-house staff at the Louvre, the movie's inconsistent depictions of "past" events, and how both Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) and the Louvre are used as props for the script.