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Narrative

A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether non-fictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc.). Narratives can be presented through a sequence of written or spoken words, through still or moving images, or through any combination of these. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare ("to tell"), which is derived from the adjective gnarus ("knowing or skilled"). The formal and literary process of constructing a narrative—narration—is one of the four traditional rhetorical modes of discourse, along with argumentation, description, and exposition. This is a somewhat distinct usage from narration in the narrower sense of a commentary used to convey a story. Many additional narrative techniques, particularly literary ones, are used to build and enhance any given story.

The social and cultural activity of sharing narratives is called storytelling, and its earliest form is oral storytelling. During most people's childhoods, these narratives are used to guide them on proper behavior, history, formation of a communal identity, and values from their cultural standpoint, as studied explicitly in anthropology today among traditional indigenous peoples.

Narrative is found in all mediums of human creativity, art, and entertainment, including speech, literature, theatre, music and song, comics, journalism, film, television, animation and video, video games, radio, game-play, unstructured recreation, and performance in general, as well as some painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and other visual arts, as long as a sequence of events is presented. Several art movements, such as modern art, refuse the narrative in favor of the abstract and conceptual.

Narrative can be organized into a number of thematic or formal categories: nonfiction (such as creative nonfiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry, and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend, and historical fiction) and fiction proper (such as literature in the form of prose and sometimes poetry, short stories, novels, narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Narratives may also be nested within other narratives, such as narratives told by an unreliable narrator (a character) typically found in the genre of noir fiction. An important part of many narratives is its narrative mode, the set of methods used to communicate the narrative through a written or spoken commentary (see also "Aesthetics approach" below).

Overview
A narrative is a telling of some actual or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, sometimes recounted by a narrator to an audience (although there may be more than one of each). A personal narrative is a prose narrative relating personal experience. Narratives are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations and also from dramatic enactments of events (although a dramatic work may also include narrative speeches). A narrative consists of a set of events (the story) recounted in the process of narration (or discourse), in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order (the plot, which can also mean "story synopsis"). The term "emplotment" describes how, when making sense of personal experience, authors or other storytellers structure and order narratives. The category of narratives includes both the shortest accounts of events (for example, the cat sat on the mat or a brief news item) and the most extended historical or biographical works, diaries, travelogues, and so forth, as well as novels, ballads, epics, short stories, and other fictional forms. In the study of fiction, it is usual to divide novels and shorter stories into first-person and third-person narratives. As an adjective, "narrative" means "characterized by or relating to storytelling"; thus, narrative technique is any of the methods used for telling stories, and narrative poetry is the class of poems (including ballads, epics, and verse romances) that tell stories, as distinct from dramatic and lyric poetry. Some theorists of narratology have attempted to isolate the quality or set of properties that distinguishes narrative from non-narrative writings; this is called narrativity.

Elements
Certain basic elements are necessary and sufficient to define all works of narrative, including, most well-studied, all narrative works of fiction. Thus, the following essential elements of narrative are also often referred to as the elements of fiction.

Character
Characters are the individual persons inside a work of narrative; their choices and behaviors propel the plot forward. They typically are named humans whose actions and speech sometimes convey important motives. They may be entirely imaginary, or they may have a basis in real-life individuals. The audience's first impressions are influential on how they perceive a character, for example whether they empathize with a character or not, feeling for them as if they were real. The audience's familiarity with a character results in their expectations about how characters will behave in later scenes. Characters who behave contrary to their previous patterns of behavior (their characterization) can be confusing or jarring to the audience. Narratives usually have main characters, protagonists, whom the story revolves around, who encounter a central conflict, or who gain knowledge or grow significantly across the story. Some stories may also have antagonists, characters who oppose, hinder, or fight against the protagonist. In many traditional narratives, the protagonist is specifically a hero: a sympathetic person who battles (often literally) for morally good causes. The hero may face a villain: an antagonist who fights against morally good causes or even actively perpetrates evil. Many other ways of classifying characters exist too.

Conflict
Broadly speaking, conflict is any tension that drives the thoughts and actions of characters. Narrowly speaking, the conflict is the major problem a protagonist, or main character, encounters across a story. Often, a protagonist additionally struggles with a sense of anxiety, insecurity, indecisiveness, or other mental difficulty as result of this conflict, which can be regarded as a secondary or internal conflict. Longer works of narrative typically involve many conflicts, or smaller-level conflicts that occur alongside the main one. Conflict can be classified into a variety of types, with some common ones being: character versus character, character versus nature, character versus society, character versus unavoidable circumstances, and character versus self. If the conflict is brought to an end towards the end of the story, this is known as resolution.

Narrative mode
The narrative mode is the set of choices and techniques the author or creator selects in framing their story: how the narrative is told. It includes the scope of information presented or withheld, the type or style of language used, the channel or medium through which the story is presented, the way and extent to which narrative exposition and other types of commentary are communicated, and the overall point of view or perspective. An example of narrative perspective is a first-person narrative, in which some character (often the main one) refers openly to the self, using pronouns like "I" and "me", in communicating the story to the audience. Contrarily, in a third-person narrative, such pronouns are avoided in the telling of the story, perhaps because the teller is merely an impersonal written commentary of the story rather than a personal character within it. Both of these explicit tellings of a narrative through a spoken or written commentary are examples of a technique called narration, which is required only in written narratives but optional in other types. Though narration is a narrower term, it is occasionally used as a synonym for narrative mode in a very broad sense.

Plot
The plot is the sequence of events that occurs in a narrative from the beginning to the middle to the end. It typically occurs through a process of cause and effect, in which characters' actions or other events produce reactions that allow the story to progress. Put another way, plot is structured through a series of scenes in which related events occur that lead to subsequent scenes. These events form plot points, moments of change that affect the characters' understandings, decisions, and actions. The movement of the plot forward often corresponds to protagonists encountering or realizing the conflict, and then working to resolve it, creating emotional stakes for the characters as well as the audience. (The audience's anxious feeling of anticipation due to high emotional stakes is called suspense.)

Setting
The setting is the time, place, and context in which a story takes place. It includes the physical and temporal surroundings that the characters inhabit and can also include the social or cultural conventions that affect characters. Sometimes, the setting may resemble a character in the sense that it has specific traits, undergoes actions that affect the plot, and develops over the course of the story.

Theme
Themes are the major underlying ideas presented by a story, generally left open to the audience's own interpretation. Themes are more abstract than other elements and are subjective: open to discussion by the audience who, by the story's end, can argue about which big ideas or messages were explored, what conclusions can be drawn, and which ones the work's creator intended. Thus, the audience may come to different conclusions about a work's themes than what the creator intended or regardless of what the creator intended. They can also develop new ideas about its themes as the work progresses.

History
In India, archaeological evidence of the presence of stories is found at the Indus valley civilization site, Lothal. On one large vessel, the artist depicts birds with fish in their beaks resting in a tree, while a fox-like animal stands below. This scene bears resemblance to the story of The Fox and the Crow in the Panchatantra. On a miniature jar, the story of the thirsty crow and deer is depicted, of how the deer could not drink from the narrow mouth of the jar, while the crow succeeded by dropping stones into the jar. The features of the animals are clear and graceful.

Human nature
Owen Flanagan of Duke University, a leading consciousness researcher, writes, "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers." Stories are an important aspect of culture. Many works of art and most works of literature tell stories; indeed, most of the humanities involve stories. Stories are of ancient origin, existing in ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek, Chinese, and Indian cultures and their myths. Stories are also a ubiquitous component of human communication, used as parables and examples to illustrate points. Storytelling was probably one of the earliest forms of entertainment. As noted by Owen Flanagan, narrative may also refer to psychological processes in self-identity, memory, and meaning-making.

Semiotics begins with the individual building blocks of meaning called signs; semantics is the way in which signs are combined into codes to transmit messages. This is part of a general communication system using both verbal and non-verbal elements, and creating a discourse with different modalities and forms.

In On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson attests that literature exists as a separate entity. He and many other semioticians prefer the view that all texts, whether spoken or written, are the same, except that some authors encode their texts with distinctive literary qualities that distinguish them from other forms of discourse. Nevertheless, there is a clear trend to address literary narrative forms as separable from other forms. This is first seen in Russian Formalism through Victor Shklovsky's analysis of the relationship between composition and style, and in the work of Vladimir Propp, who analyzed the plots used in traditional folk-tales and identified 31 distinct functional components. This trend (or these trends) continued in the work of the Prague School and of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. It leads to a structural analysis of narrative and an increasingly influential body of modern work that raises important theoretical questions:
 * What is text?
 * What is its role (culture)?
 * How is it manifested as art, cinema, theater, or literature?
 * Why is narrative divided into different genres, such as poetry, short stories, and novels?

Literary theory
In literary theoretic approach, narrative is being narrowly defined as fiction-writing mode in which the narrator is communicating directly to the reader. Until the late 19th century, literary criticism as an academic exercise dealt solely with poetry (including epic poems like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, and poetic drama like Shakespeare). Most poems did not have a narrator distinct from the author.

But novels, lending a number of voices to several characters in addition to narrator's, created a possibility of narrator's views differing significantly from the author's views. With the rise of the novel in the 18th century, the concept of the narrator (as opposed to "author") made the question of narrator a prominent one for literary theory. It has been proposed that perspective and interpretive knowledge are the essential characteristics, while focalization and structure are lateral characteristics of the narrator.

The role of literary theory in narrative has been disputed; with some interpretations like Todorov's narrative model that views all narratives in a cyclical manner, and that each narrative is characterized by a three part structure that allows the narrative to progress. The beginning stage being an establishment of equilibrium—a state of non conflict, followed by a disruption to this state, caused by an external event, and lastly a restoration or a return to equilibrium—a conclusion that brings the narrative back to a similar space before the events of the narrative unfolded.

The school of literary criticism known as Russian formalism has applied methods that are more often used to analyse narrative fiction, to non-fictional texts such as political speeches.

Other critiques of literary theory in narrative challenge the very role of literariness in narrative, as well as the role of narrative in literature. Meaning, narratives, and their associated aesthetics, emotions, and values have the ability to operate without the presence of literature, and vice versa. According to Didier Costa, the structural model used by Todorov and others is unfairly biased toward a Western interpretation of narrative, and that a more comprehensive and transformative model must be created in order to properly analyze narrative discourse in literature. Framing also plays a pivotal role in narrative structure; an analysis of the historical and cultural contexts present during the development of a narrative is needed in order to more accurately represent the role of narratology in societies that relied heavily on oral narratives.

Aesthetics approach
Narrative is a highly aesthetic art. Thoughtfully composed stories have a number of aesthetic elements. Such elements include the idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles, and ends, or the process of exposition-development-climax-denouement, with coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality including retention of the past, attention to present action, and future anticipation; a substantial focus on character and characterization, "arguably the most important single component of the novel" (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); different voices interacting, "the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms, and registers" (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97; see also the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin for expansion of this idea); a narrator or narrator-like voice, which "addresses" and "interacts with" reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, forming a plotted narrative, and at other times much more visible, "arguing" for and against various positions; relies substantially on the use of literary tropes (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often intertextual with other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward Bildungsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community.

Psychological approach
Within philosophy of mind, the social sciences, and various clinical fields including medicine, narrative can refer to aspects of human psychology. A personal narrative process is involved in a person's sense of personal or cultural identity, and in the creation and construction of memories; it is thought by some to be the fundamental nature of the self. The breakdown of a coherent or positive narrative has been implicated in the development of psychosis and mental disorders, and its repair said to play an important role in journeys of recovery. Narrative therapy is a form of psychotherapy.

Illness narratives are a way for a person affected by an illness to make sense of his or her experiences. They typically follow one of several set patterns: restitution, chaos, or quest narratives. In the restitution narrative, the person sees the illness as a temporary detour. The primary goal is to return permanently to normal life and normal health. These may also be called cure narratives. In the chaos narrative, the person sees the illness as a permanent state that will inexorably get worse, with no redeeming virtues. This is typical of diseases like Alzheimer's disease: the patient gets worse and worse, and there is no hope of returning to normal life. The third major type, the quest narrative, positions the illness experience as an opportunity to transform oneself into a better person through overcoming adversity and re-learning what is most important in life; the physical outcome of the illness is less important than the spiritual and psychological transformation. This is typical of the triumphant view of cancer survivorship in the breast cancer culture. Survivors may be expected to articulate a wisdom narrative, in which they explain to others a new and better view of the meaning of life.

Personality traits, more specifically the Big Five personality traits, appear to be associated with the type of language or patterns of word use found in an individual's self-narrative. In other words, language use in self-narratives accurately reflects human personality. The linguistic correlates of each Big Five trait are as follows:
 * Extraversion - positively correlated with words referring to humans, social processes, and family;
 * Agreeableness - positively correlated with family, inclusiveness, and certainty; negatively correlated with anger and body (that is, few negative comments about health or body);
 * Conscientiousness - positively correlated with achievement and work; negatively related to body, death, anger, and exclusiveness;
 * Neuroticism - positively correlated with sadness, negative emotion, body, anger, home, and anxiety; negatively correlated with work;
 * Openness - positively correlated with perceptual processes, hearing, and exclusiveness

Social-sciences approaches
Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining how they believe the event was generated. Narratives thus lie at the foundations of our cognitive procedures and also provide an explanatory framework for the social sciences, particularly when it is difficult to assemble enough cases to permit statistical analysis. Narrative is often used in case study research in the social sciences. Here it has been found that the dense, contextual, and interpenetrating nature of social forces uncovered by detailed narratives is often more interesting and useful for both social theory and social policy than other forms of social inquiry. Research using narrative methods in the social sciences has been described as still being in its infancy but this perspective has several advantages such as access to an existing, rich vocabulary of analytical terms: plot, genre, subtext, epic, hero/heroine, story arc (e.g., beginning–middle–end), and so on. Another benefit is it emphasizes that even apparently non-fictional documents (speeches, policies, legislation) are still fictions, in the sense they are authored and usually have an intended audience in mind.

Sociologists Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein have contributed to the formation of a constructionist approach to narrative in sociology. From their book The Self We Live By: Narrative Identity in a Postmodern World (2000), to more recent texts such as Analyzing Narrative Reality (2009) and Varieties of Narrative Analysis (2012), they have developed an analytic framework for researching stories and storytelling that is centered on the interplay of institutional discourses (big stories) on the one hand, and everyday accounts (little stories) on the other. The goal is the sociological understanding of formal and lived texts of experience, featuring the production, practices, and communication of accounts.

Inquiry approach
In order to avoid "hardened stories", or "narratives that become context-free, portable, and ready to be used anywhere and anytime for illustrative purposes" and are being used as conceptual metaphors as defined by linguist George Lakoff, an approach called narrative inquiry was proposed, resting on the epistemological assumption that human beings make sense of random or complex multicausal experience by the imposition of story structures. Human propensity to simplify data through a predilection for narratives over complex data sets can lead to the narrative fallacy. It is easier for the human mind to remember and make decisions on the basis of stories with meaning, than to remember strings of data. This is one reason why narratives are so powerful and why many of the classics in the humanities and social sciences are written in the narrative format. But humans can read meaning into data and compose stories, even where this is unwarranted. Some scholars suggest that the narrative fallacy and other biases can be avoided by applying standard methodical checks for validity (statistics) and reliability (statistics) in terms of how data (narratives) are collected, analyzed, and presented. More typically, scholars working with narrative prefer to use other evaluative criteria (such as believability or perhaps interpretive validity ) since they do not see statistical validity as meaningfully applicable to qualitative data: "the concepts of validity and reliability, as understood from the positivist perspective, are somehow inappropriate and inadequate when applied to interpretive research". Several criteria for assessing the validity of narrative research was proposed, including the objective aspect, the emotional aspect, the social/moral aspect, and the clarity of the story.

Mathematical-sociology approach
In mathematical sociology, the theory of comparative narratives was devised in order to describe and compare the structures (expressed as "and" in a directed graph where multiple causal links incident into a node are conjoined) of action-driven sequential events.

Narratives so conceived comprise the following ingredients:
 * A finite set of state descriptions of the world S, the components of which are weakly ordered in time;
 * A finite set of actors/agents (individual or collective), P;
 * A finite set of actions A;
 * A mapping of P onto A;

The structure (directed graph) is generated by letting the nodes stand for the states and the directed edges represent how the states are changed by specified actions. The action skeleton can then be abstracted, comprising a further digraph where the actions are depicted as nodes and edges take the form "action a co-determined (in context of other actions) action b".

Narratives can be both abstracted and generalised by imposing an algebra upon their structures and thence defining homomorphism between the algebras. The insertion of action-driven causal links in a narrative can be achieved using the method of Bayesian narratives.

Bayesian narratives
Developed by Peter Abell, the theory of Bayesian Narratives conceives a narrative as a directed graph comprising multiple causal links (social interactions) of the general form: "action a causes action b in a specified context". In the absence of sufficient comparative cases to enable statistical treatment of the causal links, items of evidence in support and against a particular causal link are assembled and used to compute the Bayesian likelihood ratio of the link. Subjective causal statements of the form "I did b because of a" and subjective counterfactuals "if it had not been for a I would not have done b" are notable items of evidence.

In music
Linearity is one of several narrative qualities that can be found in a musical composition. As noted by American musicologist Edward Cone, narrative terms are also present in the analytical language about music. The different components of a fugue — subject, answer, exposition, discussion, and summary — can be cited as an example. However, there are several views on the concept of narrative in music and the role it plays. One theory is that of Theodore Adorno, who has suggested that "music recites itself, is its own context, narrates without narrative". Another, is that of Carolyn Abbate, who has suggested that "certain gestures experienced in music constitute a narrating voice". Still others have argued that narrative is a semiotic enterprise that can enrich musical analysis. The French musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez contends that "the narrative, strictly speaking, is not in the music, but in the plot imagined and constructed by the listeners". He argues that discussing music in terms of narrativity is simply metaphorical and that the "imagined plot" may be influenced by the work's title or other programmatic information provided by the composer. However, Abbate has revealed numerous examples of musical devices that function as narrative voices, by limiting music's ability to narrate to rare "moments that can be identified by their bizarre and disruptive effect". Various theorists share this view of narrative appearing in disruptive rather than normative moments in music. The final word is yet to be said regarding narratives in music, as there is still much to be determined.

In film
Unlike most forms of narratives that are inherently language based (whether that be narratives presented in literature or orally), film narratives face additional challenges in creating a cohesive narrative. Whereas the general assumption in literary theory is that a narrator must be present in order to develop a narrative, as Schmid proposes; the act of an author writing his or her words in text is what communicates to the audience (in this case readers) the narrative of the text, and the author represents an act of narrative communication between the textual narrator and the narratee. This is in line with Fludernik's perspective on what's called cognitive narratology—which states that a literary text has the ability to manifest itself into an imagined, representational illusion that the reader will create for themselves, and can vary greatly from reader to reader. In other words, the scenarios of a literary text (referring to settings, frames, schemes, etc.) are going to be represented differently for each individual reader based on a multiplicity of factors, including the reader's own personal life experiences that allow them to comprehend the literary text in a distinct manner from anyone else.

Film narrative does not have the luxury of having a textual narrator that guides its audience toward a formative narrative; nor does it have the ability to allow its audience to visually manifest the contents of its narrative in a unique fashion like literature does. Instead, film narratives utilize visual and auditory devices in substitution for a narrative subject; these devices include cinematography, editing, sound design (both diegetic and non-diegetic sound), as well as the arrangement and decisions on how and where the subjects are located onscreen—known as mise-en-scène. These cinematic devices, among others, contribute to the unique blend of visual and auditory storytelling that culminates to what Jose Landa refers to as a "visual narrative instance". And unlike narratives found in other performance arts such as plays and musicals, film narratives are not bound to a specific place and time, and are not limited by scene transitions in plays, which are restricted by set design and allotted time.

In mythology
The nature or existence of a formative narrative in many of the world's myths, folktales, and legends has been a topic of debate for many modern scholars; but the most common consensus among academics is that throughout most cultures, traditional mythologies and folklore tales are constructed and retold with a specific narrative purpose that serves to offer a society an understandable explanation of natural phenomena—oftentimes absent of a verifiable author. These explanatory tales manifest themselves in various forms and serve different societal functions, including life lessons for individuals to learn from (for example, the Ancient Greek tale of Icarus refusing to listen to his elders and flying too close to the sun), explaining forces of nature or other natural phenomena (for example, the flood myth that spans cultures all over the world), and providing an understanding of human nature, as exemplified by the myth of Cupid and Psyche.

Considering how mythologies have historically been transmitted and passed down through oral retellings, there is no qualitative or reliable method to precisely trace exactly where and when a tale originated; and since myths are rooted in a remote past, and are viewed as a factual account of happenings within the culture it originated from, the worldview present in many oral mythologies is from a cosmological perspective—one that is told from a voice that has no physical embodiment, and is passed down and modified from generation to generation. This cosmological worldview in myth is what provides all mythological narratives credence, and since they are easily communicated and modified through oral tradition among various cultures, they help solidify the cultural identity of a civilization and contribute to the notion of a collective human consciousness that continues to help shape one's own understanding of the world.

Myth is often used in an overarching sense to describe a multitude of folklore genres, but there is a significance in distinguishing the various forms of folklore in order to properly determine what narratives constitute as mythological, as anthropologist Sir James Frazer suggests. Frazer contends that there are three primary categories of mythology (now more broadly considered categories of folklore): Myths, legends, and folktales, and that by definition, each genre pulls its narrative from a different ontological source, and therefore has different implications within a civilization. Frazer states:

"If these definitions be accepted, we may say that myth has its source in reason, legend in memory, and folk-tale in imagination; and that the three riper products of the human mind which correspond to these its crude creations are science, history, and romance."

Janet Bacon expanded upon Frazer's categorization in her 1921 publication—The Voyage of The Argonauts.

 * 1) Myth – According to Janet Bacon's 1921 publication, "Myth has an explanatory intention. It explains some natural phenomenon whose causes are not obvious, or some ritual practice whose origin has been forgotten." Bacon views myths as narratives that serve a practical societal function of providing a satisfactory explanation for many of humanity's greatest questions. Those questions address topics such as astronomical events, historical circumstances, environmental phenomena, and a range of human experiences including love, anger, greed, and isolation.
 * 2) Legend – According to Bacon, "Legend, on the other hand, is true tradition founded on the fortunes of real people or on adventures at real places. Agamemnon, Lycurgus, Coriolanus, King Arthur, Saladin, are real people whose fame and the legends which spread it have become world-wide." Legends are mythical figures whose accomplishments and accolades live beyond their own mortality and transcend to the realm of myth by way of verbal communication through the ages. Like myth, they are rooted in the past, but unlike the sacred ephemeral space in which myths occur, legends are often individuals of human flesh that lived here on earth long ago, and are believed as fact. In American folklore, the tale of Davy Crockett or debatably Paul Bunyan can be considered legends—they were real people who lived in the world, but through the years of regional folktales have assumed a mythological quality.
 * 3) Folktale – Bacon classifies folktale as such, "Folk-tale, however, calls for no belief, being wholly the product of the imagination. In far distant ages some inventive story-teller was pleased to pass an idle hour with stories told of many-a-feat." Bacon's definition assumes that folktales do not possess the same underlying factualness that myths and legends tend to have. While folktales still hold a considerable cultural value, they are simply not regarded as true within a civilization. Bacon says, like myths, folktales are imagined and created by someone at some point, but differ in that folktales' primary purpose is to entertain; and that like legends, folktales may possess some element of truth in their original conception, but lack any form of credibility found in legends.

Structure
In the absence of a known author or original narrator, myth narratives are oftentimes referred to as prose narratives. Prose narratives tend to be relatively linear regarding the time period they occur in, and are traditionally marked by its natural flow of speech as opposed to the rhythmic structure found in various forms of literature such as poetry and haikus. The structure of prose narratives allows it to be easily understood by many—as the narrative generally starts at the beginning of the story, and ends when the protagonist has resolved the conflict. These kinds of narratives are generally accepted as true within society, and are told from a place of great reverence and sacredness. Myths are believed to occur in a remote past—one that is before the creation or establishment of the civilization they derive from, and are intended to provide an account for things such as humanity's origins, natural phenomenon, and human nature. Thematically, myths seek to provide information about oneself, and many are viewed as among some of the oldest forms of prose narratives, which grants traditional myths their life-defining characteristics that continue to be communicated today.

Another theory regarding the purpose and function of mythological narratives derives from 20th Century philologist Georges Dumézil and his formative theory of the "trifunctionalism" found in Indo-European mythologies. Dumèzil refers only to the myths found in Indo-European societies, but the primary assertion made by his theory is that Indo-European life was structured around the notion of three distinct and necessary societal functions, and as a result, the various gods and goddesses in Indo-European mythology assumed these functions as well. The three functions were organized by cultural significance, with the first function being the most grand and sacred. For Dumèzil, these functions were so vital, they manifested themselves in every aspect of life and were at the center of everyday life.

These "functions", as Dumèzil puts it, were an array of esoteric knowledge and wisdom that was reflected by the mythology. The first function was sovereignty—and was divided into two additional categories: magical and juridical. As each function in Dumèzil's theory corresponded to a designated social class in the human realm; the first function was the highest, and was reserved for the status of kings and other royalty. In an interview with Alain Benoist, Dumèzil described magical sovereignty as such,"'[Magical Sovereignty] consists of the mysterious administration, the 'magic' of the universe, the general ordering of the cosmos. This is a 'disquieting' aspect, terrifying from certain perspectives. The other aspect is more reassuring, more oriented to the human world. It is the 'juridical' part of the sovereign function.'"This implies that gods of the first function are responsible for the overall structure and order of the universe, and those gods who possess juridical sovereignty are more closely connected to the realm of humans and are responsible for the concept of justice and order. Dumèzil uses the pantheon of Norse gods as examples of these functions in his 1981 essay—he finds that the Norse gods Odin and Tyr reflect the different brands of sovereignty. Odin is the author of the cosmos, and possessor of infinite esoteric knowledge—going so far as to sacrifice his eye for the accumulation of more knowledge. While Tyr—seen as the "just god"—is more concerned with upholding justice, as illustrated by the epic myth of Tyr losing his hand in exchange for the monster Fenrir to cease his terrorization of the gods. Dumèzil's theory suggests that through these myths, concepts of universal wisdom and justice were able to be communicated to the Nordic people in the form of a mythological narrative.

The second function as described by Dumèzil is that of the proverbial hero or champion. These myths functioned to convey the themes of heroism, strength, and bravery and were most often represented in both the human world and the mythological world by valiant warriors. While the gods of the second function were still revered in society, they did not possess the same infinite knowledge found in the first category. A Norse god that would fall under the second function would be Thor—god of thunder. Thor possessed great strength, and was often first into battle, as ordered by his father Odin. This second function reflects Indo-European cultures' high regard for the warrior class, and explains the belief in an afterlife that rewards a valiant death on the battlefield; for the Norse mythology, this is represented by Valhalla.

Lastly, Dumèzil's third function is composed of gods that reflect the nature and values of the most common people in Indo-European life. These gods often presided over the realms of healing, prosperity, fertility, wealth, luxury, and youth—any kind of function that was easily related to by the common peasant farmer in a society. Just as a farmer would live and sustain themselves off their land, the gods of the third function were responsible for the prosperity of their crops, and were also in charge of other forms of everyday life that would never be observed by the status of kings and warriors, such as mischievousness and promiscuity. An example found in Norse mythology could be seen through the god Freyr—a god who was closely connected to acts of debauchery and overindulging.

Dumèzil viewed his theory of trifunctionalism as distinct from other mythological theories because of the way the narratives of Indo-European mythology permeated into every aspect of life within these societies, to the point that the societal view of death shifted away from a primal perception that tells one to fear death, and instead death became seen as the penultimate act of heroism—by solidifying a person's position in the hall of the gods when they pass from this realm to the next. Additionally, Dumèzil proposed that his theory stood at the foundation of the modern understanding of the Christian Trinity, citing that the three key deities of Odin, Thor, and Freyr were often depicted together in a trio—seen by many as an overarching representation of what would be known today as "divinity".

In cultural storytelling
A narrative can take on the shape of a story, which gives listeners an entertaining and collaborative avenue for acquiring knowledge. Many cultures use storytelling as a way to record histories, myths, and values. These stories can be seen as living entities of narrative among cultural communities, as they carry the shared experience and history of the culture within them. Stories are often used within indigenous cultures in order to share knowledge to the younger generation. Due to indigenous narratives leaving room for open-ended interpretation, native stories often engage children in the storytelling process so that they can make their own meaning and explanations within the story. This promotes holistic thinking among native children, which works toward merging an individual and world identity. Such an identity upholds native epistemology and gives children a sense of belonging as their cultural identity develops through the sharing and passing on of stories.

For example, a number of indigenous stories are used to illustrate a value or lesson. In the Western Apache tribe, stories can be used to warn of the misfortune that befalls people when they do not follow acceptable behavior. One story speaks to the offense of a mother's meddling in her married son's life. In the story, the Western Apache tribe is under attack from a neighboring tribe, the Pimas. The Apache mother hears a scream. Thinking it is her son's wife screaming, she tries to intervene by yelling at him. This alerts the Pima tribe to her location, and she is promptly killed due to intervening in her son's life.

Indigenous American cultures use storytelling to teach children the values and lessons of life. Although storytelling provides entertainment, its primary purpose is to educate. Alaskan Indigenous Natives state that narratives teach children where they fit in, what their society expects of them, how to create a peaceful living environment, and to be responsible, worthy members of their communities. In the Mexican culture, many adult figures tell their children stories in order to teach children values such as individuality, obedience, honesty, trust, and compassion. For example, one of the versions of La Llorona is used to teach children to make safe decisions at night and to maintain the morals of the community.

Narratives are considered by the Canadian Métis community, to help children understand that the world around them is interconnected to their lives and communities. For example, the Métis community share the "Humorous Horse Story" to children, which portrays that horses stumble throughout life just like humans do. Navajo stories also use dead animals as metaphors by showing that all things have purpose. Lastly, elders from Alaskan Native communities claim that the use of animals as metaphors allow children to form their own perspectives while at the same time self-reflecting on their own lives.

American Indian elders also state that storytelling invites the listeners, especially children, to draw their own conclusions and perspectives while self-reflecting upon their lives. Furthermore, they insist that narratives help children grasp and obtain a wide range of perspectives that help them interpret their lives in the context of the story. American Indian community members emphasize to children that the method of obtaining knowledge can be found in stories passed down through each generation. Moreover, community members also let the children interpret and build a different perspective of each story.

In the military field
An emerging field of information warfare is the "battle of the narratives". The battle of the narratives is a full-blown battle in the cognitive dimension of the information environment, just as traditional warfare is fought in the physical domains (air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace). One of the foundational struggles in warfare in the physical domains is to shape the environment such that the contest of arms will be fought on terms that are to one's advantage. Likewise, a key component of the battle of the narratives is to succeed in establishing the reasons for and potential outcomes of the conflict, on terms favorable to one's efforts.

Historiography
In historiography, according to Lawrence Stone, narrative has traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by historians. In 1979, at a time when the new social history was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a move back toward the narrative. Stone defined narrative as organized chronologically; focused on a single coherent story; descriptive rather than analytical; concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and dealing with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."

Some philosophers identify narratives with a type of explanation. Mark Bevir argues, for example, that narratives explain actions by appealing to the beliefs and desires of actors and by locating webs of beliefs in the context of historical traditions. Narrative is an alternative form of explanation to that associated with natural science.

Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and clever examples rather than statistical regularities.

Storytelling rights
Storytelling rights may be broadly defined as the ethics of sharing narratives (including—but not limited to—firsthand, secondhand, and imagined stories). In Storytelling Rights: The uses of oral and written texts by urban adolescents, author Amy Shuman offers the following definition of storytelling rights: "the important and precarious relationship between narrative and event and, specifically, between the participants in an event and the reporters who claim the right to talk about what happened."

The ethics of retelling other people's stories may be explored through a number of questions: whose story is being told and how, what is the story's purpose or aim, what does the story promise (for instance: empathy, redemption, authenticity, clarification)—and at whose benefit? Storytelling rights also implicates questions of consent, empathy, and accurate representation. While storytelling—and retelling—can function as a powerful tool for agency and advocacy, it can also lead to misunderstanding and exploitation.

Storytelling rights is notably important in the genre of personal experience narrative. Academic disciplines such as performance, folklore, literature, anthropology, cultural studies, and other social sciences may involve the study of storytelling rights, often hinging on ethics.

Other specific applications

 * Narrative environment is a contested term that has been used for techniques of architectural or exhibition design in which 'stories are told in space' and also for the virtual environments in which computer games are played and which are invented by the computer game authors.
 * Narrative film usually uses images and sounds on film (or, more recently, on analogue or digital video media) to convey a story. Narrative film is usually thought of in terms of fiction but it may also assemble stories from filmed reality, as in some documentary film, but narrative film may also use animation.
 * Narrative history is a genre of factual historical writing that uses chronology as its framework (as opposed to a thematic treatment of a historical subject).
 * Narrative photography is photography used to tell stories or in conjunction with stories.
 * Narrative poetry is poetry that tells a story.
 * Metanarrative, sometimes also known as master- or grand narrative, is a higher-level cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience you've had in life. Similar to metanarrative are masterplots or "recurrent skeletal stories, belonging to cultures and individuals that play a powerful role in questions of identity, values, and the understanding of life."

title: Narrative


text:
Pierre Brossolette

Pierre Brossolette (25 June 1903 – 22 March 1944) was a French journalist, politician and major hero of the French Resistance in World War II.

Brossolette ran an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance from a bookshop on rue de la Pompe, before serving as a liaison officer in London, where he also was a radio anchor for the BBC, and carried out three clandestine missions in France. Arrested in Brittany as he was trying to reach the UK on a mission back from France alongside Émile Bollaert, Brossolette was taken into custody by the Sicherheitsdienst (the security service of the SS). He committed suicide by jumping out of a window at their headquarters on 84 Avenue Foch in Paris as he feared he would reveal the lengths of French Resistance networks under torture; he died of his wounds at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital later that day.

On 27 May 2015, his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon with national honours at the request of President François Hollande, alongside politician Jean Zay and fellow Resistance members Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz.

Education and journalism
Pierre Brossolette was born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to a family deeply involved in the fights for laic schools in early 20th century France. His father was Léon Brossolette, General Inspector for Primary Education; his mother Jeanne Vial was the daughter of Francisque Vial, Director of Secondary Education, responsible for making secondary education free in France.

Brossolette ranked first at the entrance examination to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure; throughout his education held the title of "cacique" which was internally attributed to the most brilliant student, ahead of intellectuals such as philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch and two years before Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Aron. In 1925 he graduated second to Georges Bidault after a small scandal on the dissertation themes for the final examination. His passion for history had led him to choose this "agrégation" instead of the more usual and prestigious philosophy one. During this time and while he was in his military service, he married Gilberte Bruel and had two children, Anne and Claude.

Instead of pursuing an academic career like most normaliens, he longed for action and decided to enter journalism and politics. He joined the Section française de l'Internationale ouvrière (SFIO), the main socialist party, in 1929, adhered to the LDH and LICA league and entered freemasonry. He worked as a journalist for Notre Temps, L'Europe Nouvelle, the party newspaper Le Populaire and the state-owned Radio PTT but was fired when he violently opposed the Munich Agreement on air in 1939. In his newspaper columns, Brossolette had evolved from a resolute pacifist and europeanist, after Aristide Briand's ideals, to a denunciator of both fascism and communism.

Resistance activities
When World War II broke out, he joined the army as a lieutenant of the 5th régiment d'infanterie; before the fall of France, he reached the rank of captain receiving two citations for the French War Cross for having retreated his battalion in an orderly way. After the Armistice, when the Vichy regime forbade him to teach, Brossolette and his wife took over a bookstore specialised in Russian literature at the Rue de la Pompe near Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, where he had attended high school. The bookstore became an intelligence hub of Parisian resistance where documents, such as Renault factory plans used for its bombing, were exchanged unnoticed, thanks to the extensive library available underground.

He was a popular voice on the radio before the war and his chronicles on Hitler's rise led to being blacklisted early in the 1930s by the Nazis. It did not take long before he was approached by his friend Agnès Humbert and introduced to Jean Cassou and the Groupe du musée de l'Homme, the very first resistance network. He just had time to produce the last issue of the newsletter Résistance before narrowly escaping its dismantlement.

By then assuming a pivotal role in the ZO (Zone Occupée) Resistance, Brossolette coordinated contacts between groups such as Libération-Nord from Christian Pineau, the Organisation Civile et Militaire (OCM) and Comité d'Action Socialiste (CAS). He finally obtained a liaison with London and General Charles de Gaulle when he was hired by conservative Gilbert Renault also known as Colonel Rémy as press and propaganda manager of Confrérie Notre-Dame (CND), by then the most important network in Northern France.

In April 1942, Brossolette met De Gaulle in London as representative of the ZO Resistance and was hired to work on bringing political credibility to De Gaulle to back his recognition as the only Free French Forces leader by the Allies in his feud against Henri Giraud in Algiers. At the same time, he was promoted to major (commandant) and awarded Compagnon de la Libération.

Brossolette created the civilian arm of the BCRAM intelligence service, which became the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA), in liaison with the RF section of the British side, Special Operations Executive (SOE). Strong ties of camaraderie were forged between Brossolette (codenamed Brumaire, also known as Commandant Bourgat), BCRA's chief André Dewavrin (codenamed Arquebuse, also known as Colonel Passy) and SOE's Forest Frederick Edward Yeo-Thomas (codenamed Shelley, also known as The White Rabbit). De Gaulle set up his Free French intelligence system to combine both military and political roles, including covert operations. The policy was reversed in 1943 by Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie (1900–1969), the Interior Minister, who insisted on civilian control of political intelligence.

The three friends were sent on a mission to France and united, under the CCZN (Comité de Coordination de Zone Nord), the various ZO Resistance groups which had been thoroughly divided by political views, including the communist-led Front National (mission Arquebuse-Brumaire); they were thus instrumental in the merging with the ZL (Zone Libre) Resistance similarly united by Jean Moulin under the MUR. This led to the creation of the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) by Moulin through the addition of the political parties and unions and ultimately to De Gaulle's unequivocal recognition as Free France's political representative to the Allies.

During this time, Pierre Brossolette resumed his radio chronicles on BBC with high-profile speeches to the "army of shadows", replacing Maurice Schumann as anchor (38 times). In a speech at the Albert Hall on 18 June 1943, he famously praised the soutiers de la gloire (or "stokers of glory") in a reference to the fallen anonymous soldiers and resistants. Brossolette also resumed his newspaper work through a series of articles on France's situation, including one in La Marseillaise considered by many to be the doctrinal founding of the Gaullisme de guerre movement.

Politics
In addition to journalism, Pierre Brossolette was also a politician. He was a protégé of Léon Blum and was considered an up-and-coming star of the SFIO party, running elections on his Troyes (Champagne) base. He assumed cabinet functions during the Popular Front government and as a political pundit on official Radio PTT he was considered the de facto foreign policy spokesman of the socialist government. Already calling for deep rejuvenation of the political class before the war, he attributed French defeat in 1940 to the corrupt political system of the Third Republic.

As he politically structured the Parisian resistance, Brossolette succeeded in convincing the network leaders to create a temporary Resistance Party under De Gaulle's leadership after the war, focused on promoting ambitious social transformations while avoiding the predictable enmity and chaos of post-Liberation times. This political and social plan, including nationalisations and price controls, inspired the March 1944 Conseil national de la Résistance programme and was implemented after war.

Brossolette's criticism of the old parliamentarian system, together with the role of communist networks inside the CNR, became the main point of disagreement with his southern counterpart Jean Moulin. His desire to disband all the old parties through a complete reshuffle of ideological lines logically brought him into conflict with the party leaders. As a result, he was excluded from the newly reconstituted SFIO party by Daniel Mayer and Gaston Defferre a few days before being arrested, although the decision to remove him from the party was never enforced and was actually forgotten.

Despite this, most of his ideas were implemented in 1958 when De Gaulle established the Fifth Republic and established a presidentialist system based around his Rally of the French People (RPF) party. However, De Gaulle was pushed in the short term to decide in favour of Jean Moulin's proposal as he still struggled to show the Allies (Americans in particular) that he was not a dictator. Brossolette's ideas of a Resistance party raised many opponents' fears of a "bonapartian" drift, especially among fellow socialists in London including Pierre Cot and Raymond Aron. This seemed to be confirmed to his detractors' eyes when Brossolette succeeded a bold blow against the Vichy regime by exfiltrating from France Charles Vallin, deputy leader of conservative French Social Party (PSF) that had surged as the main French party with over 30% at pre-war elections, but deemed proto-fascist by the left. Hence the French Fourth Republic eventually reverted to the Third Republic's pre-war parliamentarist system.

During his last missions, Brossolette worked on creating a new party that could be the major force of the left. He was inspired by the British Labour Party, using a non-Marxist or, at least, reformist approach (thus effectively challenging the French Socialist Party). For that, he spent his last days writing an ambitious critique of Marx's political philosophy as a by-product of 18th-century rationalism that would provide the theoretical framework for this party. Unfortunately, at the time of his arrest the manuscripts were thrown overboard at sea over Brittany shores.

Arrest
Brossolette returned to Paris for a third mission to reorganise the Parisian resistance which was in disarray after successive Gestapo raids, especially by CND's dismantling.

By then, his role and importance was already well known to the SS Intelligence Services after Moulin's death and despite De Gaulle's clear reluctance to appoint him as substitute CNR chief. He escaped arrest many times and was summoned to return to Britain by late 1943 to introduce the newly appointed CNR chief, Émile Bollaert, to De Gaulle. The bad winter weather cancelled many Lysander exfiltration attempts (conducted only under moonlight) or Lysanders would be shot down as in a December attempt near Laon, so in February 1944, they decided to return by boat from Brittany. However, the vessel, hit by a storm, shipwrecked at Pointe du Raz. They managed to reach the coast and to be hidden by local Resistance, but were betrayed by a local woman at a checkpoint.

Bollaert and Brossolette were not identified and were kept imprisoned in Rennes for weeks. F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, when informed of Brossolette's capture, decided to be immediately parachuted onto the continent and organise his escape. Nevertheless, they were recognised before the planned action and taken to the Intelligence Services (Sicherheitsdienst) headquarters on Avenue Foch by senior SD officer Ernst Misselwitz in person on 19 March. It was recently confirmed that he was identified by a semi-coded report to London from CNR's Claude Bouchinet-Serreules and Jacques Bingen written by the services of Daniel Cordier intercepted at the Pyrenees, tragically self-fulfilling the severe criticism of Brossolette and Yeo-Thomas about the lack of prudence inside the Parisian Délégation générale. Yeo-Thomas himself would be captured as he prepared a bold escape from Rennes Prison wearing German uniforms with the help of Brigitte Friang. Both Yeo-Thomas and Friang were captured before planned action as many Parisian networks were dismantled following the so-called "Rue de la Pompe affair" (after the location of the Delegation générale) and Pierre Manuel's avows.

Torture and death
Brossolette was tortured at 84 Avenue Foch in Paris, enduring severe beatings and waterboardings over a two-and-a-half-day period. On 22 March, while he was left alone and recovered some consciousness, he threw himself through the window of the garret room of the building's sixth floor. Since he had not swallowed his cyanide capsule when captured in Rennes, he was afraid of implicating others and probably chose to silence himself. There was a widespread belief among resistants that it was difficult, if not impossible, not to speak under torture.

He died later in the evening at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. On 24 March, he was cremated at Père Lachaise Cemetery. His ashes were kept at Père Lachaise Cemetery's columbarium, urn 3913 according to official cemetery records. Brossolette's reportedly last words were enigmatic: "all will be fine Tuesday".

Posterity
From after the war until the late 1950s, Brossolette was considered the main leader of the French Resistance, though many were claimed heroes by their political family (such as Honoré d'Estienne d'Orves by royalists and Gabriel Péri by communists). Brossolette's fame was helped by his media notoriety before the war on Radio-PTT and on wartime BBC emissions, his networking role that made his name or codename known and remembered over almost every Resistance member in northern France and by flattering early accounts of BCRA's chief Passy in his memoirs although he had also created, through his independent position and sarcastic wit, many enemies among party leaders, Gaullists, communists and even socialists that survived him.

De Gaulle himself thought otherwise and as he started writing his memoirs on 1954 and later assumed power, he attributed the main leading role to his by-then relatively unknown representative Jean Moulin rather than field leaders as De Gaulle emphasized the top-down unification work that objectively allowed him to be recognized by the Allies. This was formalized in 1964 by the transfer of Moulin's ashes to the Panthéon, and backed by an emotional speech by André Malraux.

With time, Brossolette was relegated to a second place and became the hero of his party SFIO while Moulin came to symbolize the myth of the French Resistance unity while the country struggled with the Algerian war and as De Gaulle tried to avoid civil war calling for union while noticing the growing popular clout of the Resistance legend on the postwar imagination.

Later, Brossolette's memory suffered another blow when the 1981-elected socialist president François Mitterrand chose to honour Moulin at a Panthéon investiture ceremony instead of rehabilitating Brossolette's role. This further enhanced his relegation – even inside the socialist political family, as evidenced by the modest celebrations of his birth centenary in 2003 and the SFIO/PS centenary. At the time, a senior party official Harlem Désir (currently secretary-general of the PS) anecdotally told that the most important figure of the party's century was Jean Moulin – who actually never was a party member and deemed instead close to the Radical Party.

Since then, he has been fairly better remembered than heroes such as Bingen, Jean Cavaillès or Berty Albrecht or important leaders such as Henri Frenay, but overall eclipsed by Moulin's popularity.

More recently in 2013, a support committee presided by historian Mona Ozouf was set up to bid for the transfer of Pierre Brossolette's ashes to the Panthéon, backed by an internet petition at the committee's site. On 21 February 2014, France's President François Hollande announced the transfer of Pierre Brossolette's ashes to the Panthéon with 3 other resistants Geneviève de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion, as well as a former pre-war Minister Jean Zay. Brossolette's ashes were kept at the columbarium of Père Lachaise Cemetery (urns 3902 or 3913) until his entrance to the Panthéon, which was celebrated on 27 May 2015.

Homages
In France today, Brossolette's name is better known than the man himself or his life achievements, thanks to the great number of streets – nearly 500 out of which 127 in Greater Paris, schools and public facilities bearing it (see below). His widow Gilberte was prominent in relaying his political ideas. In the 1950s, she was the first woman to enter – and, as vice-president, occasionally preside over – the French Senate.

In Paris, a small street in the Quartier Latin between Rue Érasme and Rue Calvin, near École Normale Supérieure, was christened Rue Pierre-Brossolette in 1944 as among the very few celebrating a 20th-century person, together with Pierre and Marie Curie. A notable exception is Lyon, probably illustrating the rivalries between the two Zones as conversely no street in Paris had been christened after Jean Moulin until 1965.

Buildings in Paris such as the former bookstore and nearby Lycée Janson de Sailly's court at Rue de la Pompe, the residence at Rue de Grenelle, his birthplace at rue Michel-Ange, the Maison de Radio France and the Ministry of the Interior's court at Rue des Saussaies all feature commemorative plaques and his name is mentioned on a floor plaque at the Panthéon.

In Narbonne plage, a unique aeolian memorial attests to his popularity in the early postwar years and marks the place of his exfiltration by felucca Seadog. In Saint-Saëns, a stele commemorates the first Lysander exfiltration to London and nearby Plogoff another marks the failed Brittany exfiltration attempt.

Brossolette was also featured in the first series of Heroes of the Resistance by French PTT in 1957. The Saint-Cyr Military Academy ROTC Class of 2004 was christened after Brossolette, and a class song was created for the occasion. The masonic Grande Loge de France named its cultural circle after Condorcet-Brossolette.

Military honours

 * First Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 with bronze star (1940).
 * Compagnon de la Libération, by decree of October 17, 1942, and named member of Ordre de la Libération Council.
 * Croix de guerre 1939–1945 with silver-gilt palm (1943)
 * Médaille de la Résistance with rosette.
 * Knight of Légion d'honneur.

Operations and missions

 * 27 April 1942, Saint-Saëns (near Rouen), first exfiltration
 * 3 June 1942, Chalon-sur-Saône, blind dropping (single)
 * Operation Leda, 5 September 1942, Narbonne, second exfiltration, felucca Seadog
 * Operation Atala, 26 January 1943, Le Grand-Malleray (near Bourges), dropping (single)
 * Mission Arquebuse-Brumaire, Jan–April 1943
 * Operation Liberté/Juliette, 15 April 1943, third exfiltration, Lysander (with André Dewavrin and F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas)
 * Trip to Algiers, 13 August – 3 September 1943
 * Operation Bomb, 18 September 1943, Angoulême, Lysander (with F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas)
 * Mission Marie-Claire, Sept–Feb 1944
 * Operation Sten, 10 December 1944, near Laon, cancelled (Lysander shot down)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Pierre Brossolette


text:
Leopold Trepper

Leopold Zakharovich Trepper (23 February 1904 – 19 January 1982) was a Polish Communist and career Soviet agent of the Red Army Intelligence. With the code name Otto, Trepper had worked with the Red Army since 1930. He was also a resistance fighter and journalist.

Trepper and Richard Sorge, a Soviet military intelligence officer, were the two main Soviet agents in Europe and were employed as roving agents to set up espionage networks throughout Europe and in Japan. While Sorge was a penetration agent, Trepper ran a series of clandestine cells for organising agents in Europe. Trepper used the latest technology at the time—small wireless radios—to communicate with Soviet intelligence. Although the Funkabwehr's monitoring of the radios transmission eventually led to the destruction of Trepper's organisation, this sophisticated use of the technology enabled the espionage organisation to behave as a network with the ability to achieve tactical surprise and deliver high-quality intelligence, such as the warning of Operation Barbarossa.

In 1936, Trepper became the technical director of a Soviet Red Army Intelligence unit in western Europe. He was responsible for recruiting agents and creating espionage networks.

Trepper was an experienced intelligence officer, and an extremely resourceful and capable man completely at home in the west. He was a man who could not be drawn in conversation, who lived a reclusive life, and had a talent of judging people that enabled him to easily penetrate significant groups.

By the start of World War II, Trepper controlled a large espionage network in Belgium, that had links with Dutch, German and Swiss agents and operated seven separate espionage networks in France. His operation was known as the Red Orchestra to the Abwehr.

Life
On 23 February 1904, Leopold Trepper was born to a large Jewish family of 10 children in Nowy Targ, Poland, which was part of Austria-Hungary at the time. Trepper's father was a travelling farm machinery and seed merchant who later died when Trepper was almost twelve, leaving the family in financial straits. His parents sent him to school in Lwów, to escape the strongly militant and anti-Semitic tradition in Poland. Trepper met his future wife, Luba, in Lwów. She worked in a chocolate factory and took evening classes to train as a teacher. She was also a Jewish communist who travelled under the aliases Sarah Orschitzer and Luba Brekson. After school, Trepper moved to Kraków to study history and literature at the Jagiellonian University. His lack of money led him to left-wing student groups. After the October Revolution, he joined the Bolsheviks and became a communist.

After the Polish–Soviet War, Poland suffered an economic crisis and Trepper had to leave university due to a lack of funds. He found work first as a workshop locksmith, mason, and later worked in the mines in Katowice. After leaving the mines, he worked in Dąbrowa Górnicza where, due to extreme poverty and lack of food, he agitated the workers in Dombrova to strike. As one of the ringleaders, he was caught and imprisoned for eight months. His later pseudonym, Domb, came from Dombrowa, the German stylization of Dąbrowa Górnicza.

Trepper applied for a visa to France when he found it impossible to obtain work after the uprising, but was refused. Earlier, in 1916, Trepper had joined the Zionist, socialist movement Hashomer Hatzair. This membership was to help him in 1926 to emigrate to Haifa, Palestine, via Brindisi to work on the roads and later as an agricultural worker in a kibbutz. Orschitzer followed Trepper to Palestine. She was involved in an illegal communist demonstration, and was arrested and jailed; she would have been deported had she not married a Palestinian citizen.

After moving to Tel Aviv in 1929, Trepper became a member of the central committee of the Palestine Communist Party. Between 1928 and 1930, Trepper was the organiser of the Eḥud or Unity faction, a Jewish-Arab communist labour organisation within the Histadrut trade union body; most of its members came from the Kerem HaTeimanim area and worked against the British forces in Palestine. In 1929, he attended a meeting of the International Red Aid, where he was identified as an agitator and militant communist by the British, who subsequently arrested and interned him for 15 days at the citadel's prison in Acre, Israel. Trepper organised a hunger strike after learning that the communist prisoners were to be deported. He was released after news of the hunger strike reached London and the British newspapers, and he and the hunger strikers were placed on stretchers outside the prison, as they were too weak to walk due to lack of food.

In March 1930, after he was given the choice of leaving Palestine or being forcefully deported to Cyprus, Trepper travelled via Syria to Marseille, France, and worked as a dishwasher. He then travelled to Paris where he found work as a decorator living a poor existence. He came into contact with numerous left wing intellectuals and communist workers that eventually led him to become a member of the Rabkor, an illegal political organisation that was dominated by communists who sent both men and intelligence to Moscow. He continued to work for the organisation until French intelligence dismantled it in 1932. Trepper left Paris on a Polish passport and escaped to Berlin by train, where he contacted the Soviet embassy. After several days, he was ordered to report to Moscow in the spring of 1932.

Between 1932 and 1935, Trepper worked to become a GRU agent by learning his trade. After attending KUNMZ University, where he obtained a diploma, he studied history at the Institute of Red Professors and was awarded a degree, allowing him to work as a history teacher in Moscow. Trepper was in constant touch with the Russian intelligence instructors who taught him the practical skills of an espionage agent. At the same time, Orschitzer also attended KUNMZ University for a year.

In 1935, Trepper submitted a newspaper column covering art to the newspaper for Russian Jews called Truth. In the winter of the same year his training was completed.

Espionage career
In 1935 or 1936, Trepper was given the post of technical director of Soviet intelligence in Western Europe and was known as the Big Chief. He returned to Paris on a passport under the name Sommer, and spent five months investigating the extensive network and accidentally exposed a double agent: a Dutch Jew who was the former head of the Soviet espionage network in the United States and was turned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He returned to the Soviet Union under the name Majeris to inform Soviet intelligence of his findings and went back to Paris five months later.

In 1936, Trepper visited Scandinavia for a short-term technical mission, before returning to Paris — which remained his base until the end of 1938 — in December. For most of 1937, he was concerned with extensive planning and re-organisation of Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe; in that year he visited Switzerland, the British Isles, and Scandinavia.

Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company
In the autumn of 1938, Trepper made contact with Jewish businessman Léon Grossvogel, whom he knew in Palestine. Grossvogel ran a small business called "Le Roi du Caoutchouc" or "The Raincoat King" on behalf of its owners. Trepper used provided money to create the export division of The Raincoat King called the Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company, which dealt in raincoat exports and was considered by Trepper to be the ideal cover for the group's espionage network. As the business had to operate with the full knowledge of the state, shares had to be issued. Among the shareholders was former official of the Belgian Foreign Office, Jules Jaspar. Jaspar's brother, Henri Jaspar, was the former prime minister of Belgium, so Jaspar was seen as the ideal person to direct the company and provide it with a veneer of respectability. The company was created in December 1938.

On 6 March 1939, Trepper used the alias Adam Mikler and identified as a wealthy Canadian businessman, traveled from Quebec while being accompanied by Orschitzer, who traveled as Anna Mikler. They moved to Brussels from Paris, making it their new base and settled in their apartment located at 198 Avenue Richard Neybergh, Brussels. After the company was created, Trepper used the circulation of gossip and rumours by his group to spread the word that a wealthy Canadian had funded the business to establish his cover in the Belgian business community. On 25 March 1939, Trepper met the GRU intelligence agent Mikhail Makarov in a café. Makarov, a wireless telegraphy (WT) operator, forger, and expert on secret inks, had been sent from Moscow via Stockholm and Copenhagen to Paris whilst travelling on a Uruguayan passport, under the alias Carlos Alamo.

Makarov's original duty was to provide Trepper with forged documentation, but since Grossvogel had introduced Abraham Rajchmann, who became the group's forger, he became a WT operator for the group instead and was posted to Ostend to work at a branch of the Raincoat Company, which was sold to him to strengthen his cover. Makarov immediately started to train other operators in WT procedure. In July 1939 Anatoly Gurevich, posing as the wealthy Vincente Sierra, arrived in Brussels on a Uruguayan passport, and contacted Trepper in Ghent on 17 July. It was arranged that Trepper would teach the operation of the Raincoat Company to Gurevich, who would then move to Denmark to establish a new firm. To make contacts across different social strata, Gurevich familiarised himself with Belgian society and studied the country to learn about its economy. Gurevich took part in ballroom dancing and riding lessons, and as he travelled between luxury hotels, mail bearing the stamps of Uruguay awaited his arrival.

In the months leading up to the war, Trepper's plans changed, and Gurevich ended up working as an assistant to Trepper. Gurevich performed the normal bureaucratic operations in an espionage network including being a cipher clerk, deciphering instructions from Soviet intelligence, and preparing reports with information forwarded from a contact in the Soviet Trade Representation of Belgium. In 1939, Trepper met the American classical dancer, Georgie De Winter in Brussels. De Winter became Trepper's mistress and had a child, Patrick De Winter; historians are unsure if the child was Trepper's.

France
In July 1940, Trepper fled Belgium with Grossvogel and moved to Paris, where Grossvogel and Polish Jew Hillel Katz were Trepper's main assistants. Trepper changed his alias to Jean Gilbert and got in touch with General Ivan Susloparov, who was the Soviet military attaché in the Vichy government. On their first meeting, Trepper informed Susloparov of Adolf Hitler's plan to invade the Soviet Union, which the latter believed to be true. Trepper also arranged to have his wife and child returned to Moscow, and they left in August 1940. However, his main goal was to find and make use of a radio transmitter and a radio operator. Susloparov supplied the names of a couple who were Polish militant communists — Hersch and Miriam Sokol — as possible radio operators—but both the Sokols had to be trained in radio procedures by Grossvogel. At the same time, Trepper recruited civil engineer and Russian aristocrat Basil Maximovitch.

Simexco and Simex
In March 1941, Simexco was established in Paris as a replacement cover company. The firm's profits were channelled to provide funding to the group, via its Department III. The firm made a considerable profit over the year that was used by both Trepper and Gurevich as a personal expense account. Additional funding came from Soviet intelligence, and was received in monthly sums of $8,000 to $10,000 through the Russian military attaché in Paris. When the war started, the funds were sent via Switzerland in dollar amounts that were agreed in advance with Soviet intelligence via radio and delivered to Trepper. The money was used to maintain the operations of the Trepper group and to cover the necessary expenses to carry out special assignments. Trepper spent lavishly on bribes, the upkeep of the Château de Billeron, sundries, and large daily expenses to maintain his cover as a successful businessman.

Robinson network
In September 1941, Trepper met with Comintern agent Henry Robinson, who was one of the most important sources of intelligence in Paris. He ran his own large espionage network, which had revealed to the Soviets that Hitler was inclined to call off Operation Sea Lion, the plan to invade the British Isles. The Comintern organisation had lost prestige with Stalin, who suspected it of deviating from Communist norms. Robinson was also suspected of being an agent of the Deuxième Bureau and was subsequently in ideological conflict with Soviet intelligence. It was unusual for two senior agents to meet, but an exception was made as it was felt by Soviet intelligence that Robinson's extensive contacts could help Trepper build his French network. Trepper learned of a radio transmitter that was being run by the French Communist Party in Paris from Robinson, and was ordered to take charge of Robinson's network.

Around that time, Trepper was introduced to Anna Maximovitch by her brother Basil Maximovitch. Both Anna and Basil became very important to Trepper: Basil had an affair with Margarete Hoffman-Scholz, secretary to Wehrmacht colonel Hans Kuprian, who was on a committee that processed prisoners from the Vichy government for slave labour, and a niece to General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, military commander of Paris;

Anna was a psychiatric neurologist who opened a clinic in Choisy-le-Roi in the late 1940s. It was a moneyed area of Paris which enabled her to pick up gossip and recruit from her patients, some of whom were high ranking French nobility and administrative people including Rohan-Chabot's husband, Alain Louis Auguste Marie de Rohan-Chabot, who was a French officer and resistance fighter. One of those patients was Helene Claire Marie de Liencourt, Countess de Rohan-Chabot, who rented out the empty 18th-century Château Billeron located in Lugny-Champagne to Maximovitch as a meeting place for the group.

Rue des Atrébates
On 30 November 1941, the house at 101 Rue des Atrébates in Brussels, run by Rita Arnould and Zofia Poznańska and used to transmit intelligence, was discovered by the Funkabwehr. On 12 December 1941, the residence was raided by the Abwehr.

By February 1942, Trepper re-established communication with Soviet intelligence and was able to give a full report on the situation. The Soviets instructed Trepper to contact Soviet Army Captain Konstantin Jeffremov, who had been living in Belgium. In May 1942, a meeting was arranged between the two men in Brussels, where Trepper instructed Jeffremov to take over Gurevich's Belgian and low-countries espionage network. He also instructed him to maintain radio silence for six months, and gave Jeffremov 100,000 Belgian francs for expenses. Radio communications for the espionage group in Brussels was to be operated by GRU agent Johann Wenzel. In January 1942, Trepper ordered Gurevich to travel to Marseilles with Jules Jaspar and Alfred Corbin to establish a new branch office of Simex to enable the recruitment of a new espionage network.

In May 1942, Wenzel began transmitting important traffic to the Soviet Union. On 29–30 June 1942, the house that Wenzel was transmitting from, 12 Rue de Namur in Brussels, was raided by the local police under the command of Abwehr officer Harry Piepe. Wenzel was interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo for six to eight weeks and confessed to everything, including the cypher keys he used and his code name, which allowed the Funkabwehr to decipher a large amount of back traffic belonging to the group. After Wenzel's arrest, Jeffremov tried to hide, but was arrested on 22 July 1942 while trying to obtain false identity papers. One of the names that Wenzel surrendered was Rajchmann, who was placed under surveillance and arrested on 2 September 1942. Almost immediately, Rajchmann agreed to cooperate with the Abwehr. On 12 October 1942, Malvina Gruber, Rajchmann's mistress was arrested by the Abwehr in Brussels, and she immediately decided to cooperate with the Abwehr. She spoke of Gurevich and exposed the Trepper espionage network in France. Jeffremov (sources vary) also exposed the Simexco company name and the Trepper espionage network in France to the Abwehr.

Reorganisation
When the Sokols and Johann Wenzel were arrested, Trepper lost his radio link with Soviet intelligence. Trepper asked Robinson to arrange a radio link to Soviet intelligence, but the latter refused. Trepper turned to Gurevich in Marseille and visited him several times to establish contact with the Soviets, but Gurevich refused to use his transmitter and was effectively lost to the network. Trepper was forced to turn to Pierre and Suzanne Giraud, who were established to have a transmitter either at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt or Le Pecq (sources vary) by Grossvogel and ordered to master the equipment. Suzanne had originally worked as a cutout for Trepper, and the couple were unprepared for the work; they failed and were arrested by the Gestapo.

Arrest
On 19 November 1942, the premises of Simexco were searched by the Abwehr, and all known associates of the company were arrested. However, no espionage material was found and the interrogation of prisoners failed to determine the whereabouts of Monsieur Gilbert, the alias that Trepper was using in his dealings with the firm. After being tortured, the French commercial director of the firm, Alfred Corbin, informed the Gestapo of the address of Trepper's dentist, where Trepper was arrested on 25 November 1942 by Karl Giering. Trepper was imprisoned on a third floor room on the Rue des Saussaies in Paris. He offered to collaborate with the Abwehr, who subsequently treated Trepper leniently in the expectation that he would serve as a double agent in Paris. He was allowed to take daily walks and go into town to buy necessities, but always accompanied by two Sonderkommando guards. According to Piepe, when Trepper talked, it was not out of fear of torture or death, unlike Wenzel, but out of duty. While he gave up the names and addresses of most of the members of his own network, he sacrificed his associates to protect various members of the French Communist Party, in whom he had an absolute belief. The first people to be betrayed were his assistants Katz and Grossvogel. In 2002, author Patrick Marnham suggested Trepper not only exposed Soviet agent Henry Robinson, but may have been the source that betrayed French resistance leader Jean Moulin. When Gurevich was arrested on 9 November 1942 in Marseille, he was moved to Paris and kept in the next room to Trepper. There was a mutual animosity between the two men.

Funkspiel
On 25 December 1942, Trepper was informed that he would be running a Funkspiel operation with Gurevich. On 13 February, Trepper was moved to a house belonging to Karl Bömelburg at 40 boulevard Victor Hugo, Neuilly-sur-Seine. Over the next month, the Gestapo conducted a battle of wits with Trepper and Gurevich in the hope of exposing more members of the espionage network.

Escape
On 13 September 1943, Trepper escaped Gestapo custody while visiting a pharmacy, Pharmacie Baillie, near the railway station at St. Lazare. Although he was kept under guard, he managed to slip away and avoid recapture. He contacted De Winter, and they both agreed to hide out in Le Vésinet, where he wrote to Heinz Pannwitz to explain his disappearance was not an escape, but merely an attempt to ensure he stayed alive as a move that designed to provide the maximum advantage for Soviet intelligence. On 18 September 1943, the couple moved to a house in Suresnes that belonged to Mrs. Queyrie; De Winter worked as a courier to arrange the move. Trepper wrote to Pannwitz a second time, deploring the fact that in spite of his request, a search was being made for him, and that he was placed in a very uncomfortable position. At the time, Trepper was the subject of an Identification Order in France, German and Belgium as a "wanted dangerous spy".

Trepper contacted Suzanne Spaak and Jean Claude Spaak through De Winter, using the alias Jean Gilbert, in the hope that he could make contact with the French Communist Party who could send a message to the Soviet military attaché in London to warn them of the collapse of the network. Jean Claude Spaak was a brother to Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak. Suzanne had a wide range of contacts and it was through her influence that Trepper hoped to contact Moscow. While they were waiting, De Winter organised another location where they could hide on Rue Du Chabanais, and they moved in on the 24 September.

Jean Claude had not heard from Trepper since 1942, when the Sokols had left a large sum of money, their identity, and ration cards with Spaak for safekeeping. Trepper asked Jean Claude to forward a message to one of his agents: "I will be at the church every Sunday morning between 10 and 11am. Signed Martik." Trepper hoped to make contact with an agent at a church in Auteuil. Trepper sent De Winter to the treff, on several Sundays in a row, but no contact was made. The couple then moved to a guest-house at Bourg-la-Reine. Trepper, who wanted to restart his clandestine activities, was wary of De Winter being identified by the Gestapo due to her constant visits to the Spaak household. He asked Jean Claude for the 100,000 francs, that had been deposited by the Sokols which he gave to De Winter for expenses and sent her to a hideout in a village near Chartres in the hope that she could be smuggled into the non-occupied zone. De Winter was provided with a letter of introduction by Antonia Lyon-Smith, a friend of the Spaaks, to a local doctor in Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse who was with the resistance. En route, De Winter was arrested on 17 October 1943 by Pannwitz. At the same time, Trepper went to the church in Auteuil and noticed a black Citroën car — the signature car of the Gestapo — and fled.

Trepper learned the Gestapo had visited all his previous addresses and were close to capturing him. He warned Jean Claude, who sent both his wife and children to Belgium, before travelling to Paris, where he hid out with friends until the end of the war. Trepper last saw Jean Claude before the liberation of 23 October 1943.

Postwar period
The Soviets arrested Trepper in 1945 and took him to Russia; since 1938, he had been under suspicion, as he was recruited by General Yan Karlovich Berzin, who had fallen out of favour and was dismissed in 1935.

Trepper was personally interrogated by SMERSH Chief Viktor Abakumov, and was interned in Lubyanka, Lefortovo, and Butyrka prison. He vigorously defended his position and managed to avoid execution, but remained in prison until 1955 for unknown reasons. After his release, he submitted a detailed plan to revive both Jewish cultural life and institutions in the Soviet Union, but the plan was rejected in 1956 after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union meeting. Afterward, he returned to Warsaw to his wife and three sons. Trepper was elected to run the Yiddisher Kultur-Gezelshaftlekher Farband and also ran its publishing house, Yiddish Bukh.

Immigration to Israel
After the Six-Day War in June 1967, Władysław Gomułka of the Polish United Workers' Party gave an anti-Semitic diatribe, and when student unrest broke out in the spring of 1968, a state-organised antisemitic campaign began in Poland that led Trepper to begin the process of migrating to Israel. However, while the Polish communist government promoted and encouraged the emigration of thousands of Jews at that time, Trepper was continually refused a visa and placed under house arrest. Permission was refused until international pressure from worldwide publicity campaign that included his sons' protests and hunger strikes, forced the authorities to allow him and a few Jewish people who were in a similar situation to leave. He settled in Jerusalem in 1974.

Death
Trepper died in Jerusalem in 1982 and was buried there. According to a contemporary report from the news agency, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, "no government representatives or officials attended his funeral", though the Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, later the 11th Prime Minister of Israel, subsequently awarded Trepper the Emblem of Israel in a ceremony "attended by dozens of former members of anti-Nazi partisans and fighting groups".

title: Leopold Trepper