Families have a way of appointing their own historians, even if the recruitment process remains obscure. In the late 1990s, Caroline Huppert \u2013 the fourth of five siblings, of whom the youngest is actor Isabelle \u2013 found herself alone with her father and a tape recorder. Over five days, he opened up about his life before and during the second world war. \u201cI think I had that privileged position with him, because he had a taste for history, too,\u201d she says. \u201cBut we didn\u2019t have the same vision. I like the approach of what is called the nouvelle histoire, things like details of daily life in the past. With him, it was more emperors, kings, dates.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 25 years later, their exchanges have led to her memoir, Une Histoire Cach\u00e9e (A Hidden Story), a work that bundles up quotidian intimacy and big-ticket history in telling the story of how her parents, Raymond and Annick, fell in love. Their relationship so easily might never have happened: he was Jewish, she Catholic, and after they met in 1934 at Paris\u2019s HEC business school, her haute-bourgeois family were opposed to them marrying. A big enough obstacle even before the Nazis invade France<\/a>, and the young lovers are forced to flee the capital for the Free Zone near Lake Annecy. \u201cI wasn\u2019t aware of any of it in the least,\u201d says the 75-year-old on a phone call from her home in Paris. \u201cMy parents weren\u2019t people who talked about the past. They were always absorbed in the present, in action.\u201d<\/p>\n Militiamen patrolling in a mountain village in Haute-Savoie suspected to shelter Resistance fighters on 24 February 1944. Photograph: LAPI\/Roger Viollet\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Thanks to her father\u2019s nostalgic volte-face before he died aged 89 in 2003, Huppert began thinking about how to undertake the \u201carchaeology of her family\u201d (her mother died earlier, in 1990). But with a hectic career as director of TV films and screenwriter, she was intimidated by the task \u2013 even with her education in history. Then in 2024, another storybook miracle unlocked it for her. While fishing for a pushchair in a storage unit, Huppert\u2019s daughter jostled an old desk her mum had left her; a cache of 150 old letters hidden in a false drawer fell out. \u201cShe sent me a photo of them, and I recognised my mother\u2019s writing,\u201d says Huppert. \u201cAnd this goldmine allowed me to go to the very end of what I wanted to do with the book, because it was a really great source of information about daily life.\u201d<\/p>\n Her book closes with a high-wire climax \u2013 which Huppert prefers not to spoil. The courage they inspired in each other came as a surprise, notably \u201cthe intrepidness of my mother, who wasn\u2019t afraid of anything and crossed the demarcation line in the boot of a car\u201d. But it\u2019s in the patient logging of banal wartime realities, thanks to Annick\u2019s correspondence, where Une Histoire Cach\u00e9e also fascinates: the struggles to find food, the freezing conditions in the Savoie house where Raymond ends up fabricating drill bits for a collaborator, how the couple still snatched moments of ephemeral pleasure amid this turmoil.<\/p>\n Jean Dujardin in Les Rayons et les Ombres (2026) directed by Xavier Giannoli. Photograph: (C) 2026 Waiting For Cinema\/ Curiosa Films\/ Gaumont\/ France 3 Cine\u0301ma<\/p>\n Such minutiae are especially important as they relate to the Franco-Jewish community during the time, of which there is only \u201cpiecemeal\u201d documentation, according to Huppert. Soaking up Raymond and Annick\u2019s routine, you realise how their privations were a direct consequence of pre-war prejudices \u2013 when a wary truce had been in place between Jewish and traditional French society since the Dreyfus affair. \u201cI really wanted to describe what antisemitism looked like on a daily basis in French society, even before the Nazis\u2019 racial laws,\u201d says Huppert. \u201cAnd show the continuity with what the P\u00e9tain regime decreed \u2013 and to what point it seemed natural to everyone, bit by bit, to put those laws in place.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markIt\u2019s annoying to say \u2018the Jewish people\u2019. It\u2019s a terrible expression. I don\u2019t see where there\u2019s a Jewish people \u2013 there are Jews of all different kinds<\/p>\n Huppert brings a distinctive Jewish slant to a recent mini-boom of Vichy lit and cinema that, like much French output on the occupation, tends to focus rather on questions of collaboration and resistance: the recent films Les Rayons et Les Ombres<\/a> and Laszlo Nemes\u2019 Moulin<\/a>, the C\u00e9cile Desprairies novel The Propagandist. Daniel Auteuil\u2019s drama La Troisi\u00e8me Nuit, premiering at Cannes, will bolster the Jewish side soon. But whatever the reasons for this surge of interest \u2013 whether it\u2019s the looming prospect of a far-right government in France, or newly rising antisemitism \u2013 Huppert isn\u2019t tempted to infer any contemporary resonances. \u201cI don\u2019t know anything about that. As an archaeologist, I lean more towards understanding the origins rather than the results. It\u2019s sociologists who look at what is happening now.\u201d<\/p>\n Gilles Lellouche in Moulin directed by L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Nemes. Photograph: Pitchipoi productions<\/p>\n Not only is Huppert categorical about her work in this way, even after exploring her family\u2019s mixed heritage, she seems detached about her Jewish roots. She says she doesn\u2019t feel culturally or religiously more Jewish in the wake of writing \u2013 and in any case hates generalising: \u201cIt\u2019s annoying to say \u2018the Jewish people\u2019. It\u2019s a terrible expression. I don\u2019t see where there\u2019s a Jewish people \u2013 there are Jews of all different kinds.\u201d<\/p>\n You wonder if this neutrality isn\u2019t also part of her legacy from her secular father, who refused to convert to Catholicism in support of his kinsfolk \u2013 but still raised his family within Catholic norms in the postwar period. There\u2019s something of the same withholding independence in her sister Isabelle\u2019s acting; she has spoken of sharing her father\u2019s tendency towards silence. At any rate, Isabelle is a fan of the book. In a text, she sums up: \u201cA magnificent portrait of a woman, a highly moving homage to our family, and an exciting and superbly researched document of that time.\u201d<\/p>\n If a rapprochement with Jewishness wasn\u2019t Huppert\u2019s principal aim, the notion of lineage does count for her \u2013 just as it did for her father a quarter-century ago when he decided to share: \u201cI wanted my children and children\u2019s children, my own posterity, to know this was their history.\u201d But though she\u2019s rescued her parents from the fog of time, she couldn\u2019t do it for everyone. Huppert is still haunted by the story of Fran\u00e7ine, a young refugee whom Annick teaches English in the French Basque country, and then crosses paths with a second time in Savoie. The references in her mother\u2019s letters stopped there, and Huppert found no traces online. \u201cI was very touched by the fate of this sensitive young girl whose adolescence was stolen from her. I\u2019ve been worrying about her. I hope she survived.\u201d<\/p>\n Une Histoire Cach\u00e9e by Caroline Huppert is published by Editions Mercure de France<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Families have a way of appointing their own historians, even if the recruitment process remains obscure. 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