3. Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome De Vichy De 1944 a Nos Jours, 2Nd Ed
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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. The Milice was a paramilitary unit, created in 1943 by Joseph Darnand, at that time Secretary of State for the Maintenance of Order in the Vichy government. Its remit was to track down and eliminate the Resistance. 2. Newspaper reports of the time published extracts from the judges' report. See in particular, Philippe Rochette, 'Une reecriture de l'his toire', Liberation, 14 April 1992. Translations from this article are my own. 3. Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy de 1944 a nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1990), translated as The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (London: Harvard University Press, 1991). 4. Rousso's work on memory has many affinities with research carried out on history, literature and the Holocaust. See studies such as J. E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) and Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (Yale: Yale University Press, 1991). 5. See Bertram Gordon, 'The "Vichy Syndrome" Problem in History', French Historical Studies, 19/2 (1996) 495-518. 6. See Margaret Atack, 'L' Armee des ombres and Le Chagrin et la pi tie: Reconfigurations of Law, Legalities and the State in Post-68 France' in European Memories of the Second World War, H. Peitsch, C. Burdett and C. Gorrara (eds) (Oxford: Berghahn, 1998). 7. See Henry Rousso, 'Le syndrome de l'historien', French Historical Studies, 19/2 (Fall 1996) 519-26. 8. Two such studies are Margaret Atack, Literature and the Resistance - Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) and Alan Morris, Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Retro in Post-Gaullist France (Oxford: Berg French Studies, 1992). 9. A numbE!r of article-length studies have been published on gender, representation and the war years. See Sian Reynolds, 'The Sorrow and the Pity Revisited - Or Be Careful One Train Hides Another', French Cultural Studies, 2 (June 1990) 149-59. 10. Revisionniste refers to those historians, critics and commentators who cast doubt on or deny the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and the Final Solution. The term negationniste has also been applied to such figures, implying that their views are not so much a revision of existing views as a negation of a historically verifiable truth. 11. Few bibliographical sources exist of women's accounts of the 132 Notes 133 Occupation. Vera Laska's Nazism, Resistance and the Holocaust in World War Two (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press Ltd, 1985) has a section on women in the Resistance in France. Her earlier collection of oral testimonies, Women in the Resistance and the Holocaust (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), also has a good bibliography of texts by women on the concentration camp experience. See also Donna Evleth, France under the German Occupation: an Annotated Bibitography (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991). 12. According to Alain Brossat, Les Tondues: un carnaval moche (Paris: Editions Manya, 1992), no first-person account exists by women who were shaved at the Liberation for collaboration. At present, I have managed to locate only one text written by a woman tried for collaboration, Corinne Luchaire, Ma drole de vie (Paris: Sun, 1949). 1 REMEMBERING THE WAR YEARS 1. For a general outline of literary responses to the Occupation in post war France, see Chapter 1, 'The Heritage 1940-1969' in Alan Morris' Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the Mode Retro in Post-Gaullist France (Oxford: Berg, 1992) and Colin Nettelbeck's 'Getting the Story Right: Narratives of World War Two in Post-68 France', in Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the Nazi Occupation 1940-44, G. Hirschfeld and P. Marsh (eds), (Oxford: Berg, 1989) pp.253-93. 2. See Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy (Paris: Seuil, 1990) pp.59-65. 3. Resistancialisme is a term used for generally heroic images of a united resisting France which grew out of a Gaullist interpretation of the war years. 4. Nicholas Hewitt, 'The Literature of the Right and the Liberation: the Case of the "Hussards"', in The Liberation in France: Image and Event, H. R. Kedward and N. Wood (eds) (Oxford: Berg, 1995) pp. 285-96 (p.289). See also his full-length study, Literature and the Right in Postwar France: The Story of the Hussards (Oxford: Berg, 1996) and Margaret Atack's discussion of the 'novels of ambiguity' in Literature and the Resistance: Cultural Politics and Narrative Forms 1940-1950 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). 5. For a discussion of the literary connections between the Occupation and May 1968, see William Kidd, 'Liberation in Novels of May 68: the Intertextual Image', in The Liberation of France: Image and Event pp.323-34. 6. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, Ne-w Order 1940-44 (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972), Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 7. Jean-Pierre Azema, De Munich a la liberation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), Pascal Ory, La France allemande (Paris: Seuil, 1977). 8. For a discussion of a younger generation of French writers and the mode retro, see Part II of Alan Morris' Collaboration and Resistance 134 Notes Reviewed. 9. For a well documented analysis of the crimes against humanity debate in the Barbie and Touvier trials, see Nancy Wood, 'Crimes or Misdemeanours? Memory on Trial in Contemporary France', French Cultural Studies,S (1994) 1-21. A good summary of the historical background to the indictments of Touvier, Bousquet and Papon for crimes against humanity is given by Bertram M. Gordon in 'Collaboration, Retribution and Crimes against Humanity: the Touvier, Bousquet and Papon Affairs', Contemporary French Civilization, 19/2 (Summer/Fall 1996) 249-74. 10. Alain Finkielkraut, La Memoire vaine. Du crime contre l'humanite (Paris: Gallimard 1989) translated as Remembering in Vain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 11. In her introduction, Annette Wieviorka in Deportation et genocide. Entre la memoire et l'oubli (Paris: PIon, 1992) identifies the 1980s as the start of France's renewed obsession with the Jewish memory and the concentration camps. 12. See Anne Grynberg, Les Camps de la honte. Les internes jUifs des camps fram;ais 1939-44 (Paris: La Decouverte, 1991). 13. One of the most notorious revisionniste accounts is that of Robert Faurisson, Memoire en defense (Paris: Vieille Taupe, 1980). 14. See the collection of Pierre Vidal-Naquet's essays from this period, Les Assassins de la memoire: 'Un Eichmann de papier et autres essais sur Ie revisionnisme' (Paris: La Decouverte, 1987) translated as Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 15. Lynn A. Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1996) p.l44. 16. A large number of studies on the Liberation have appeared, some examining events from the point of view of the cultural historian, see Alain Brossat, Liberation, fete folie, 6 juin 44-8 rnai 45: mythes et rites ou Ie grand theatre des passions populaires (Paris: Autrement, 1994) and Andre Bendjebbar, Liberations revees, liberations vecues 1940-1945 (Paris: Hachette, 1994). 17. A petition was sent to Mitterrand in 1992 asking him to create a day of remembrance marking the round-up of the rafle du Vel d'Hiver in July 1942. Mitterrand refused, claiming that the French Republic had nothing to answer for as it had already disowned Vichy and its complicity in the Nazi Final Solution. Months later, Mitterrand was forced to reverse this decision. 18. Pierre Pean, Une Jeunesse fram;aise. Fram;ois Mitterrand 1934-47 (Paris: Fayard, 1994). 19. Mary Jean Green, Writing War in the Feminine', Journal of European Studies, 23 (March-June 1993) 223-37 (p.223). 20. For a discussion of four women's texts from the pre-1968 period, see Denis Boak, 'Four Frenchwomen's narratives of World War II', Journal of European Studies, 35 (1995) 381-97. 21. The Comite national des ecrivains was a group of resisting writers who wrote and published Les Lettres fram;aises, one of the most Notes 135 influential clandestine publications of the war period. 22. Elsa Triolet, Le Premier Accroc coute deux mille francs (Monaco: Denoel, 1945) translated as A Fine of Two Hundred Francs (London: Virago, 1986). Triolet's text was to win one of the most coveted liter ary prizes in France, the Prix Goncourt, in 1945. 23. For a discussion of the literary strategies of 'litterature de combat', see early chapters in Atack, Literature and the Resistance. 24. For a more detailed discussion of the Resistance and French women's wartime narratives, see Chapter 8 'Femmes de l'ombre fleurs bleues ou partisanes?' in James Steel's LitUratures de l'ombre (Paris: Presses de la fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1991) pp.143-57. 25. Triolet, 'The Lovers of Avignon' p.7. 26. For a fuller discussion of the conflict between romance and wartime commitment in the work of Elsa Triolet, see Diana Holmes, 'Ordinary Heroines: Resistance and Romance in the War Fiction of Elsa Triolet' in European Memories of the Second World War, H. Peitsch, C. Burdett and C. Gorrara (eds), (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998). For a detailed analysis of the literary structures of wartime disruption in two short stories by Triolet, see Margaret Atack, 'Narratives of Disruption 1940-1944', French Cultural Studies, 1 (1990) 233-46. 27. Triolet, 'The Lovers of Avignon' p.7. 28. Ibid. p.58. 29. Simone de Beauvoir, Le Sang des autres (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) translated as The Blood of Others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964). 30. For a very interesting article on the changing construction of the Communist Resistance heroine in the post-war era, see Hilary Footitt, Women and (Cold) War: the Cold War creation of the myth of 'La Fran"aise resistante', French Cultural Studies, 8 (1997) 41-51.