Clooney film hails French war heroine
Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars as forgotten French resistance heroine Rose Valland in The Monuments Men
HOLLYWOOD war movie The Monuments Men, which opens in cinemas today across France, has finally brought recognition to one of the unsung heroes of the Second World War: Rose Valland.
Played in the movie by recent Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, Ms Valland, who died in 1980, was a highly respected Resistance fighter who located thousands of works of art, stolen by the Nazis during the conflict.
The film was loosely based on the biography written by French Senator Corrine Bouchoux, who told France 24: “If someone had told me before that my book could be the inspiration of such a big production, I would never have believed it.”
Rose Valland was an assistant curator at the Jeu de Paume Gallery in Paris when the Nazis invaded. There, artworks destined for Hitler and his cronies were sorted.
However, as Bouchoux explained: “Throughout the occupation she (Ms Valland) became a specialist sort of spy.
“She made careful notes of every single work of art that passed through the Jeu de Paume, including their destinations.
“This information was passed on to the Resistance, and from there to the Allies so that they could avoid bombing those destinations," she added.
"Without this information, so much could have been lost.”
Sadly for Ms Valland, the credits roll on The Monuments Men at the end of the war and doesn’t chronicle her later efforts to reclaim its looted treasures.
“After 1945, Ms Valland went to Germany and stayed there until 1954,” said Bouchoux, adding that Valland, commissioned as a captain in the French army, scoured Germany with a fine-toothed comb to recover the stolen art.
“Thanks to her, some 70,000 works were returned to France, more than two-thirds of the art that had disappeared into the former Third Reich.”
Ms Valland was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and the Resistance Medal, among other accolades, but Bouchoux believes recognition for her wartime efforts has been slow because she was gay.
She said: “(Rose Valland) was simply discreet, which was important because she was aware of a number of scandals and abuses within the French establishment.
“It was in no-one’s interest, she understood, that any of these scandals saw the light of day.”
The work Ms Valland began all those years ago continues to this day. Yesterday, French minister of culture, Aurélie Filippetti, returned three paintings confiscated by the Nazis to their real owners.
