The Vichy Syndrome

From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a vivid memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. How has this proud nation dealt with les annees noires? What is the collective memory of those few years: what have the French chosen to remember, what have they chosen to conceal? In this book a French scholar examines France's war and postwar years as cycles of purposeful memory. For ten years after the Allied victory, rival myths were constructed to help France forget the devastating realites of the Nazi Occupation. In the late 1960s the mirror finally cracked with the burgeoning of iconoclastic cultural works, scandals, trials of former collaborators, and political dissent; the ensuing obsession with wartime crimes continues in France today. This is not a book about the history of Vichy itself but about the legacy of a regime the French would like to see as the creation of a few wicked men. The myth of a people united in Gaullist resistance obscured the harsh facts of widespread collaboration, antisemitism, and evil deeds. In truth, Petain's Vichy was not a German import - it had deep roots in prewar France. But the contrary, darker myth is equally misleading: France was by no means merely a nation of obedient collaborators. "The Vichy Syndrome" is aimed at specialists in European history and should appeal to Francophiles and anyone seeking to understand France's place in a newly unifying Europe.