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French Memory Laws. for a Better Past Henry Rousso

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French Memory Laws. for a Better Past Henry Rousso French Memory Laws. For a Better Past Henry Rousso To cite this version: Henry Rousso. French Memory Laws. For a Better Past. 2017. hal-02568235 HAL Id: hal-02568235 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02568235 Preprint submitted on 8 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. French Memory Laws. For a Better Past Henry Rousso “The function of law is to settle the future. The past is no longer in its power” Jean-Etienne Portalis, 18411 On February 7, 2018, two far right recently elected deputies presented a bill before the Parliament to express a national acknowledgment for the mass crimes committed by the Republican armies against the Vendeans in 1793-1794, during the French Revolution.2 It was rejected like three previous equivalent texts, presented in 2007, in 2012, and in 2013. All three included one single article: “The French Republic acknowledges the genocide of 1793-1794”.3 The 2018 bill no longer used the concept of “genocide”, but the political message was the same: what has been done for several other mass crimes in history has to be done for this particular episode. And the text added: “The Republic will be all the stronger as it will recognize its weaknesses, its errors and its faults. It cannot keep silent about what is a stain in its history [and] this bill won’t open the way to sanctions or reparations that, after two centuries, would be meaningless”.4 1 “L’office des lois et de régler l’avenir. Le passé n’est plus en leur pouvoir.” Jean-Étienne-Marie Portalis, Discours préliminaire du premier projet de Code civil. Discours prononcé le 21 janvier 1801 et le Code civil promulgué le 21 mars 1804. Foreword by Michel Massenet, Bordeaux: Éditions Confluences, 2004, p. 81. 2 ”Proposition de loi visant à la reconnaissance des crimes coMMis contre la population vendéenne en 1793-1796 et annulant les lois en exécution desquelles ils ont été coMMis, présentée par MesdaMes EmManuelle Ménard et Marie- France Lorho, députées”, AsseMblée nationale, 7 February 2018. 3 See for example: ” Proposition de loi relative à la reconnaissance du génocide vendéen de 1793–1794”, présentée par MM. Lionel Luca, Hervé de Charrette, Mme Véronique Besse, etc.”, Assemblée nationale, 21 February 2007. 4 Id. 2 These bills looked like similar laws voted in the previous years, especially the 29 January 2001 Act, recognizing the Armenian genocide, or the 21 May 2001 Act, defining Slavery as a crime against humanity. While framed in a very different political perspective, it used a similar narrative expressing a moral obligation to pay a tribute to forgotten victims in order to reinforce national identity and unity. However, it didn’t ask for any kind of reparation or retribution, procedures that the far right has often denounced when it challenged most of the public policies of memory implemented in France since the 1990’s. Everyone knew that none of these bills recalling the fate of the Vendeans had any chance to pass. The issue has been a well-known and traditional marker for the extreme right. The concept of “genocide”, first used in 1986 by Reynald Seicher, a historian and an activist5, didn’t convince more than a bunch of right-wing intellectuals. For most reliable historians, the war in Vendée, as it was called during the event itself, had nothing to do with a mass crime targeting a specific group and resulting from a planned systematic violence to exterminate the group as such. At the same moment, many other insurgent movements all over France were repressed by the revolutionary government, and the Vendeans didn’t represent an “ethnic” target. On the contrary, this is the Revolution repression which created a new identity afterwards, due to the huge death toll in the area: around 200 000 casualties. The Republican armies committed numerous atrocities against civilians: mass killings, rapes, plundering, destruction of villages.6 The event marked the memories for a long time at a local, national, and even international level, indeed leaving a stain on the Revolution’s legacy. If one accepts to use contemporary legal categories, these massacres could have been targeted as a violation of article 3 of the 1949 Geneva convention about prisoners of war in a non-international conflict or even as crimes against humanity, but not qualified them as a genocide, which doesn't diminish their seriousness. Those who raised this issue in the mid-1980’s, in the context of the anamnesis of the Nazi crimes in Europe, wanted to challenge the memory of the Holocaust and to draw a dubious comparison. These 5 Reynald Seicher, Le Génocide franco-français. La Vendée-Vengé. Foreword by Jean Meyer. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. 6 Jean-CléMent Martin, ”Sur la guerre de Vendée et le concept de 'génocide'. Une Mise au point historique, <https://www.aphg.fr/Sur-la-guerre-de-Vendee-et-le-concept-de-genocide, March 7, 2018>. 3 reactionary bills looked similar to all liberal memory laws voted before, but they were also a provocation to denounce the very principle to legislate on history. They emphasized how risky it could be opening Pandora’s box and implementing a process of redressing the past in an old country like France: among all the possible victims in a very long history of warfare and violence, which of them deserve such belated official tributes? And what would be the best criteria to distinguish between them? Invention of a tradition To understand the French debates over the memory laws, one must keep in mind some particularities of its legal and political system. First, in principle, according to the French political traditions, the Parliament is not allowed to deliver general statements. Its role is to produce the law, which is actually the only way to express an opinion on a given topic, including historical or memorial issues. Second, before being adopted, a bill can be introduced in the Parliament agenda either by the government as a "project" (“projet de loi”), or by a group of deputies as a "proposal" (“proposition de loi”). Most of memory laws came from a parliamentary initiative, reflecting more or less the desire to fulfill the claims of associations or specific civil society groups, and they have been adopted with the support of the government. Last but not least, unlike international law and many other national cases, the 1994 French criminal code splits crimes against humanity into two categories: genocide and “other” crimes. In addition, for historical reasons linked to the fear seeing officers sued after the end of the Algerian war, France didn't sign the 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.7 As a consequence, only crimes against humanity are imprescriptible whereas war crimes benefits from a statute of limitations after twenty years until recently (now, thirty years). These singularities raised many specific issues related to the application of such criminal qualifications to historical events. At an international level, the notion of crime against humanity, defined by the 1945 London Agreement creating the International 7 <https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/WarCriMes.aspx> 4 Military Tribunal, was applied retroactively to the Nazi crimes at Nuremberg, when the notion of genocide defined by the 1948 Convention was not retroactive and has never been judicially applied to any crime committed before, including the Holocaust. By introducing the genocide as a sub-category of crimes against humanity, the new French penal code created a very particular situation in leaving open the possibility that the legal notion of genocide could or could not be applied to events occurred before 1994 or 1948, mainly the Armenian genocide. In France, the concept of “loi mémorielle”– which influenced the English notion of “memory law”8 – appeared for the first time after a fierce controversy about a text voted into law on 24 February 2005, expressing the “Nation’s gratitude for the Français rapatriés”. This law referred to the million or so of people in Algeria with a French or a European background, forced to find an asylum in France in 1962, after the Algerian war. For many right-wing politicians, these victims didn’t get the same attention as other categories, and their fate was neglected in French national memory. As a matter of fact, France began to cope with its colonial past in the 1990’s mainly focusing on the wrongdoings she did as a colonial power, for instance the large-scale practice of torture in Algeria against French or Algerian anti-Colonialists. Emphasizing the fate of those who were obliged to leave their native country and who suffered because of the independence of the former colony wasn’t neutral at all: it shows how each political camp may have its own “good victims”, in a well- known process of competition. Meanwhile, this wasn’t the law as such that provoked the dispute – few voices openly criticized the idea of recalling the fate of these people – but just one article, eventually withdrawn, requiring the school curricula “to acknowledge the 8 On this issue, see Nikolay Koposov, Memory laws, memory wars : the politics of the past in Europe and Russia.
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