Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 23 Issue 1 Empire and Occupation in France and Article 3 the Francophone Worlds 1-1-1999 Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome Rosemarie Scullion University of Iowa Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Scullion, Rosemarie (1999) "Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome ," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 23: Iss. 1, Article 3. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1452 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome Abstract In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso formulated an interpretive model that has decisively influenced the directions and forms of inquiry scholars have pursued in relation to les années noires, the period between 1940 and 1944 during which France endured a catastrophic military defeat and four years of occupation by a neighboring fascist state... Keywords 1987, French historian, Henry Rousso, les années noires, military, occupation, France, French, World War II, Second World War, Vichy Syndrome This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/3 Scullion: Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome Unforgettable: History, Memory and the Vichy Syndrome Rosemarie Scullion University of Iowa In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso formulated an inter- pretive model that has decisively influenced the directions and forms of inquiry scholars have pursued in relation to les armies noires, the period between 1940 and 1944 during which France endured a catastrophic military defeat and four years of occupation by a neigh- boring fascist state. Inspired by Pierre Nora's exploration of the complex interplay between "history and memory, "' Rousso astutely recognized the pall that the traumas of World War II and the Nazi Occupation had cast over French cultural and political life of the postwar period. Marshaling compelling evidence of the seemingly intractable collective malaise he terms "The Vichy Syndrome," Rousso defined this affliction as the complex of heterogeneous symptoms and manifestations revealing, particularly in political, cultural and social life, the existence of traumas engendered by the Occupation, especially those linked to internal divisions-traumas that have been main- tained, and sometimes heightened after the events are over. (Le Syndrome 18-19)2 The four essays that follow participate in exhuming remnants of Vichy's collaborationist past and can thus be considered part and parcel of the return of historical material that, Rousso argues, was vigilantly repressed in French cultural and political life in the imme- diate aftermath of the war. But unlike Freud's theory of the uncon- scious, in which memory traces of past traumas return involuntarily, often with tremendous emotional force, the fragments of historical Published by New Prairie Press 1 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 3 12 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) past revived in these essays are of the sort that Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn might view as instances of "counter-memory."' The oppositional critical energy driving these analyses derives from a conscious will to contest the politics of forgetting that for de- cades after the war kept compromising and in some cases incriminat- ing aspects of France's collaborationist past from coming to light. Not surprisingly, a central preoccupation in the contributions these scholars have made is the history of France's wartime relations with its Jewish minority, one of the darkest memories to have emerged from les annees noires that has yet to be fully retrieved and under- stood. As Rousso observes, collective memory is often forged through the skillful "organization of forgetting" (Le Syndrome 12). These terms aptly describe the erasure upon which France's immediate postwar order imaginatively constructed its wartime identity as a monolith of anti-fascist resistance. Sustaining the heady Gaullist claim that France, at war's end, was an undivided nation whose military glory had been restored through four years of valiant patri- otic struggle required that all reminders of the nation's recent col- laborationist past be expunged from collective awareness. This was not an easy task given the political realities of the day. For as Charles de Gaulle stood before Paris's Hotel de Ville on August 25, 1944, paying rousing tribute to "the whole of France" that had "liberated itself" (qtd. in Le Syndrome 30) from Nazi rule, a good number of his compatriots were scrambling to reach Sigmaringen, the medieval for- tress where a disintegrating Third Reich harbored France's collabo- rationist government-in-exile between September 1944 and May 1945.4 That the French presence at Sigmaringen figures only mar- ginally in historical accounts of the period is in no small measure attributable to the vigilance with which France's emerging postwar order contained the signs of treason that hovered over the Libera- tion and continued to emanate from the Bavarian enclave in the final months of the war.' In his essay "The Ghosts of Sigmaringen," Philip Watts demon- strates that memory of Vichy's German endgame has been decisively shaped by the rhetorical tropes via which knowledge of that inglori- ous past has been relayed to France's postwar generations. Watts identifies the crucial role Louis-Ferdinand Ce line's 1957 novel D'un château l'autre (Castle to Castle) played in grounding two fig- ures-the operetta and the ghost-firmly in the symbolic field where https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/3 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1452 2 Scullion: Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome Scullion 13 both scholarly and broader cultural understanding of the Vichy legacy have taken form. In the opening pages of his illuminating history of the Vichy government-in-exile, for instance, Henry Rousso features passages from D'un chateau l'autre in which Celine the chronicler describes as "La rigolade de ce haut lieu" 'the ludicrous- ness of this lofty place' (qtd. in Un chateau 22) the grandiose set- ting in which Vichy notables exercised what he saw as their laugh- ably diminished power. Rousso also borrows directly from Celine in characterizing Otto Abetz-German Ambassador to occupied Paris and orchestrator of French political life at Sigmaringen-as a "grand ballet master" directing a "Viennese operetta" (20). Numerous other commentators have also taken their cue from Celine, extending the novelist's Sigmaringen-as-operetta metaphor through a corpus of historical writing in which, rhetorically speaking, French collabora- tion at Sigmaringen sheds the weighty criminal significance postwar purge courts attributed to it and becomes but an amusing little po- litical drama of negligible historical consequence.' For Celine, this rhetorical move was a savvy one indeed. It undercut the widely held view that the author was a contemptible anti-Semite who had fled France in 1944 to escape prosecution for abetting the Nazi cause, and allowed him to recast himself as an accidental tourist who had happened upon the spectacle of Vichy's burlesque demise. In un- thinkingly adopting the figural language in which D'un chateau l'autre represents the collaborationist saga at Sigmaringen, histori- ans have, Watts persuasively argues, unwittingly purveyed the dis- course of self-exoneration Celine and many of his fellow émigrés were intent on disseminating after the war. The figure of the ghost Celine relied upon to reacquaint post- war readers with wartime traveling companions such as Robert Le Vigan has also been recycled by historians.' This recourse to ghostly imagery works to dematerialize the Vichy presence at Sigmaringen and has the ideological effect of rendering seemingly immaterial the very substantive acts of collaboration these same scholars have conscientiously retrieved for the historical record. Yet historians are not alone in failing to recognize the exculpating force of the "Sigmaringen-as-ghost-town" metaphor. Even prosecutors trying cases of high treason after the war succumbed to the rhetorical lure of casting Vichy exiles as members of a "phantom government," failing to appreciate that while this figure served to minimize the significance for postwar France of the reactionary ideologies acted Published by New Prairie Press 3 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 3 14 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) out at Sigmaringen, it also diminished the political, legal, and moral import of those acts. Among the documents that bear witness to the outlook Vichy exiles had on the increasingly worrisome geopolitical and military circumstances closing in around them in late 1944 and early 1945 is the daily newspaper La France. This publishing venture was gener- ously subsidized by the Germans and placed under the direction of Jean Luchaire, the displaced regime's newly appointed Commissioner for Propaganda and Information.' Remarkably, Watts's analysis of La France's cultural and political discourse reveals that the figure of the ghost made its rhetorical appearance in Sigmaringen's sym- bolic order well before the war ended. Journalists writing for the daily made liberal use, Watts demonstrates, of prosopopeia, the trope via which the absent speak to the present and, in the pages of La France, through which deceased artists and writers of a variety of political persuasions (the sculptor Maillol, F.T. Marinetti, Voltaire, Romain Rolland, and Robert Brasillach) are both commemorated and made to speak in defense of the community of French collaborators nestled away in the Hohenzollern fortress.