Alphonse de Chateaubriant, Collaborator on Retrial

The period of the Occupation years in France continues to raise passions and stimulate debate among academics as well as the general population on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, analysis of how the French choose to remember and record their past and the activities of some of their compatriots seems to have become an obsession, suggesting that historiography as much as history lies at the heart of the debate on the memory of the war years in France. Reassessment of the Second World War period is by no means a new phenomenon; indeed, over the past fifty years it has come to represent a wide movement which has attempted to formulate and promote an adequate collective memory of both the Resistance and the collaboration. In this article I offer a critical exposition of a subjective and sympathetic exercise in remembering a collaborator, the writer and journalist Alphonse de Chateaubriant (1877-1951), setting Chateaubriant's particular case in the context of the general reassessment processes applied to Vichy France since 1945. As will be shown, his case is of national significance, because it represents an important example of the movement which, since the Second World War, has aimed to rescue the reputation of many former collaborators and with it that of the Vichy regime itself. In the immediate postwar years, the Gaullist (and nationalist) version of the Occupation promoted a view of France as a country

Humanities · Political science · Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Philosophy