Overview

"From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a vivid memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. How has this proud nation dealt with les annees noires? What is the collective memory of those few years: what have the French chosen to remember, what have they chosen to conceal? In this book a French scholar examines France's war and postwar years as cycles of purposeful memory. For ten years after the Allied victory, rival myths were constructed to help France forget the devastating realites of the Nazi Occupation. In the late 1960s the mirror finally cracked with the burgeoning of iconoclastic cultural works, scandals, trials of former collaborators, and political dissent; the ensuing obsession with wartime crimes continues in France today. This is not a book about the history of Vichy itself but about the legacy of a regime the French would like to see as the creation of a few wicked men. The myth of a people united in Gaullist resistance obscured the harsh facts of widespread collaboration, antisemitism, and evil deeds. In truth, Petain's Vichy was not a German import - it had deep roots in prewar France. But the contrary, darker myth is equally misleading: France was by no means merely a nation of obedient collaborators. ""The Vichy Syndrome"" is aimed at specialists in European history and should appeal to Francophiles and anyone seeking to understand France's place in a newly unifying Europe."

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before the poorly documented and ill-defined wider popular memory as a subject. Rousso shows us, however, how dramatic and revealing this genre can be. a study of the way the Vichy episode has been perceived and perverted by the French ever since. The result is a brilliant and intemperate book that is also a tract for the times. Rousso has set out to provide not just another narrative of les annees noires --the years of defeat, occupation, of the phantom 'French State' and the civil war--but a study of the way the Vichy episode has been perceived and perverted by the French ever since. The result is a brilliant and intemperate book that is also a tract for the times. This is an original and thought-provoking work, a 'must' for anyone interested in the political and cultural psychology of post-war France.--Nelly Wilson Jewish Quarterly Succeeds as a practical demonstration, for a particularly vivid case, of how to study a people grappling with a past. It is remarkable how few similar works there are...One understands a historian's hesitation before the poorly documented and ill-defined wider popular memory as a subject. Rousso shows us, however, how dramatic and revealing this genre can be.--Robert O. Paxton New York Review of Books

Succeeds as a practical demonstration, for a particularly vivid case, of how to study a people grappling with a past. It is remarkable how few similar works there are...One understands a historian's hesitation before the poorly documented and ill-defined wider popular memory as a subject. Rousso shows us, however, how dramatic and revealing this genre can be. -- Robert O. Paxton New York Review of Books

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