The Proof of Ignominy: Vichy France's Past and Presence

Contemporary European History

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 107-131

  Bartov, Omer ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85008566345     PISSN: 09607773     EISSN: 14692171     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0960777300004781     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), originally published as Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 a nos jours (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987, revised and reissued in 1990
2. See, e.g., Richard J. Golsan, ed., Memory, the Holocaust, and French Justice: The Bosquet and Touvier Affairs (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996); Ema Paris, Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (New York: Grove Press, 1985); Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Pierre Pean, UneJeunesse jrancaise: Francois Mitterrand, 1934-1947 (Paris: Fayard, 1994).
3. Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, transl. Gerhard Hopkins (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1968); in another essay he wrote at the time, Tlie Historian's Craft, transl. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1953), he objected, however, to the ‘cult of origins’.
4. See, e.g., Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Les Francois de Van 40, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Robert Aron, Histoire de Vichy (Paris: Fayard, 1954).
5. See Pierre Nora, ‘Le Syndrome, son passe, son avenir’, French Historical Studies 19: 2 (1995), 488; Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972); Jean-Pierre Azema and Francois Bedarida, eds., Le regime de Vichy et les Francais (Paris: Fayard, 1992).
6. For the figures, see Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 12-14, and the sources cited therein.
7. See Bertram M. Gordon, ‘The Vichy Syndrome” Problem in History’, and Henry Rousso, ‘Le Syndrome de l'histoire’, French Historical Studies 19: 2 (1995), 497-518, 519-26.
8. Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas, 2nd edn. (Paris: Galhmard, 1996). There is some irony in the title of this book, possibly unintended by the authors, since it is a translation from the German of Ernst Nolte's notorious article, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, that touched ofFthe Historikerstreit, the German historians’ controversy of the mid 1980s. Rousso and Conan agree with Nolte and other German ‘revisionists’ about the need not to submit to the weight of a murderous past, but whereas they propose to do so by studying it, Nolte's solution is to relativise it. Nevertheless, since the authors’ criticism of Jewish insistence of the memory of the Holocaust was launched in the context of a French intellectual debate from which anti-Jewish sentiments were and are still far from absent, the association with Nolte's article is rather unfortunate.
9. Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Schocken Books, 1983); Susan Zucotti, The Holocaust, the French, and thejeivs (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See also Annette Wieviorka, Deportation el genocide: Entre le memoire et Voubli (Paris: Plon, 1992), on the memory of this event in France and the distinctions between Jewish and political deportees.
10. Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society, 1914-1939, transl. Helen McPhail (Providence, R.I. and Oxford: Berg, 1992).
11. Tzvetan Todorov, A French Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War, Summer 7944, transl. Mary Byrd Kelly (Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England, 1996), 94.
12. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien liber Radikalismus, Weltanschauung, und Vemunft, 1903-1959 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996), 42-119.
13. Robert Gellately, Tlie Cestapo and Cennan Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann, Politische Denunziation im NS-Regime, oder Die kleine Macht der ‘Volksgenossen’ (Bonn: Dietz, 1995).
14. See, e.g., Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European fexvs, 3 vols. rev. edn. (New York and London: Holmes and Meier, 1985); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 2nd edn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
15. Pierre Laborie, VOpinion francaise sous Vichy (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990); and the book by Burrin reviewed here.
16. On Hitler, see Ian Kershaw, 77 ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
17. See, e.g., H. R. Kedward, In Search of the Maquis: Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Todorov, French Tragedy.
18. The other is Etienne Fouilloux, Les Chretiens francais entre crise et liberation, 1937-1947 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997), which unfortunately appeared too late for me to consider it in this article.
19. Thus, for instance, Count von Galen, Bishop of Munster, who bravely condemned the ‘euthanasia’ campaign, never spoke openly against the ‘Final Solution’. On this issue Halls's account is sorely lacking. See the forthcoming Rutgers University PhD dissertation on von Galen by Beth A. Griech-Polelle.
20. Philippe Burrin, La derive fasciste: Doriot, Deal, Bergery, /pjj-ip^j (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986); idem, Hitler and the Jews: The Origins of the Holocaust, transl. Patsy Southgate (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).
21. Burrin's section on Febvre was greeted with some resentment by French scholars. Historians, often adept at criticizing other professions, are rather more circumspect when it comes to their own. This was also recently shown in the case of German historians who contributed to SS demographic plans that culminated in genocide, but later became the founders of the left-liberal and occasionally Marxist school of West German historiography in the 1960s. See Bruno Mrozek, ‘Hitlers willige Wissenschaftler’, Die Weltwoche (July 3 1997), also posted by H-Soz-u-Kult (4 July 1997), and H-German (8 July 1997), including references to other publications on this issue in Tagesspiegel (17 June 1997) and Frankfurter Rundschau (1 July 1997). A slightly less damning version of the Febvre/Bloch affair can be found in Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 261-3.
22. Primo Levi, Tlie Drowned and the Saved, transl. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 70-1
23. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, transl. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1961), 153-7; idem, Tlie Reawakening, transl. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books/Macmillan, 1987), 1-7.
24. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, transl. Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Schocken Books, 1996), 148-9.
25. Todorov, French Tragedy
26. Sylvie Lindeperg, Les ecrans de I'ombre: La Seconde Guerre Mondiale dans le cinema fratyais (1944-1969) (Pans: CNRS Editions, 1997).
27. Laurens's article contains a brief history of shearings in France from as early as the fourteenth century (pp. 156-7), and a series of remarkable photographs of shearings after the Liberation (pp. 159-73). See also, Burnn, 205, for shearings of German women during the French occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s.
28. See, e.g., Pierre Assouline, L'epuration des inlellectuels (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1990); Peter Novick, Tfie Resistance versus Vichy: Tfie Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968); David Carroll, French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Neal Oxenhandler, Looking for Heroes in Postwar France: Albert Camus, Max Jacob, Simone Weil (Hanover, N.H. and London: University Press of New England, 1996).
29. A detailed analysis of French interwar pacifism is to be found in Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France, 1919-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
30. Alain Brossat, Les Tondues. Un camaval moche (Paris: Hachette, 1992), 62-3.
31. ‘Camps et Genocides: L'homme, la langue, les camps’, Colloque international a l'Universite de la Sorbonne, Responsables: Catherine Coquio, Irving Wohlfarth. 29-31 May 1997.
32. See Robert Antelme, L'espece humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). More recently, another account by a political inmate of Buchenwald has entered the French canon of concentration camp literature. See Jorge Semprun, L'icriture on la vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). It should be noted that of 76,000 Jews departed from France, only a fraction survived; of an equal number of French political deportees, about half returned.
33. Alain Brossat, L'epreuve du desastre: Le xxf siecle et les camps (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996).
34. L'epreuve du desastre: Le xxf siecle et les camps., 20, 23.