Wounding Memories

Mitterrand, Moulin, Touvier, and the Divine Half-Lie of Resistance

Bibliographic Data

ID8939809
AuthorsJohn Hellman (corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume19
Issue2
Pages461-461
Publication date1995-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/286783
OpenAlexW2319581939
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Henry Rousso's Petain et la n de la collaboration: Sigmaringen, 19441945, concerned with the last days of the French remnant of the national-socialist and fascist European New Order, dealt with a milieu already haunted by memory.' This book even then was challenging the way the war was being remembered with its vivid portrait of a Sigmaringen abounding with unreconciled French partisans of the New Order. The last days of the collaborationists raised all sorts of troubling questions about the memory of the Resistance and the image of a collaboration imposed by the conqueror. Both Rousso's Vichy Syndrome and his most recent monograph, Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas with journalist Eric Conan, deal with the debate over memories of the war, and since the book appeared, Francois Mitterrand has emerged as a central figure in it. What has proved particularly striking to a generation too young to remember the war is a peculiar obtuseness, a surprising, tenacious unwillingness of the generation of French who lived through the war to come fully and frankly to terms with the past. Rousso and Conan point out that since the late 1940s the debates over the Vichy regime have never been as intense; never has the past seemed as unable to pass muster as now. They recommend the desacralization of the memory of the last war2 and of the Resistance in the light of the recent

Ancient history · Biology · Political science · Resistance (ecology · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History

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