Abstract
In September 1994, a scandal erupted in France over troubling new revelations concerning the nature and duration of Socialist President François Mitterrand’s service to the collaborationist and pro-Nazi Vichy regime during the Second World War. Commenting on the hue and cry produced by these revelations, the American historian Robert Paxton wryly observed that “Vichy stirs the French public more than either money or sex.”1 At the time Paxton’s tongue-in-cheek remark referred to the fact that the French seemed more shocked by what he described as “Mitterrand’s politics of fifty years ago” than they were by other, more recent revelations concerning the president and his personal life, including the fact that Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter and that financial corruption had marked the later years of his presidency. But given the broader realities of 1990s France, Paxton’s observation had a much wider application. It served to underscore the power and pervasiveness of the memory of Vichy, of the so-called Dark Years, in French public life and to stress the capacity of that memory to disturb and unsettle the nation’s moral conscience.
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Notes
Stanley Hoffmann, Dominique Moisi, Robert O. Paxton, and Jean-Marie Domenach, “Symposium on Mitterrand’s Past,” French Politics and Society 13, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 19.
For the backgrounds and careers of Touvier and Bousquet, see Richard J. Golsan, Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice (Hanover: Dartmouth/University Press of New England, 1996). For Papon, see idem, The Papon Affair (New York: Routledge, 2000).
Eric Conan, “Enquête sur le retour d’une idéologie,” L’Express, October 2, 1997, 27.
See, for example, Papon’s interview with Annette Lévy-Willard in Libération, March 6, 1997.
For a discussion of prominent French intellectuals and their activism where Yugoslavia is concerned, see Richard J. Golsan, French Writers and the Politics of Complicity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Jacques Julliard, Ce Fascisme qui vient … (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library, 2010).
Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 48.
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Ce qui accable Papon,” Le nouvel Observateur, October 23–29, 1997, 56–57.
Stéphane Courtois, “Introduction,” The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, ed. Stéphane Courtois, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Karel Bartosek, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 9; in French, Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreurs et répression (Paris: Laffont, 1997).
Jean de Maillard, “A quoi sert le procès Papon?” Le Débat 101 (1998): 32–42.
Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006); in English, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, trans. Stephen Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
See, for example, Jean-Pierre Rioux, La France perd la mémoire (Paris: Perrin, 2006).
Olivier Wieviorka, Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from the Liberation to the Present, trans. George Holoch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 6; published originally as La Mémoire désunie: Le souvenir politique des années sombres, de la Libération à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2010).
Tzvetan Todorov, Memory as a Remedy for Evil, trans. Gila Walker (London: Seagull Books, 2010); in French, “La Mémoire contre le mal,” in La Signature humaine: Essais 1983–2008 (Paris: Seuil, 2009), 251–73.
Tzvetan Todorov, Les Abus de la mémoire (Paris: Arléa, 1995).
Boualem Sansal, The German Mujahid, trans. Frank Wynne (New York: Europa Editions, 2009); the original French edition, published in 2008 by Gallimard, is titled Le Village de lAllemand: Le journal des frères Schiller.
Laurent Binet, HHhH, trans. Sam Taylor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012); the original French edition was published under the same title (Paris: Grasset, 2009).
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© 2013 Marc Silberman and Florence Vatan
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Golsan, R.J. (2013). Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France’s “Duty to Memory”. In: Silberman, M., Vatan, F. (eds) Memory and Postwar Memorials. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343529_11
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