This volume gathers the intellectual autobiographies —or ‘ego-histories’, in Pierre Nora’s words (1987)—of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature , film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War : these are Margaret Atack (University of Leeds), Marc Dambre (Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle), Laurent Douzou (Lyon II), Hilary Footitt (University of Reading), Robert Gildea (University of Oxford), Richard J. Golsan (Texas A&M University), Bertram M. Gordon (Mills College), Christopher Lloyd (Durham University), Colin Nettelbeck (University of Melbourne), Denis Peschanski (Paris Sorbonne, EHESS and CNRS), Renée Poznanski (Ben Gurion University), Henry Rousso (Paris 8 University and CNRS), Peter Tame (Queen’s University Belfast) and Susan R. Suleiman (Harvard University). It also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton (Columbia University). Across their various disciplines, these scholars have played a crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research . The main aim of this volume is to clarify the rationales and driving forces behind their work and, consequentially, behind our current understanding of the Vichy era, which remains undoubtedly one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France.
French Perspectives on the History and Memories of the Second World War
With approximately sixty million people killed or murdered, the Second World War is indisputably a major watershed in history. The scale of death and destruction was unprecedented and some of its most horrific aspects were simply unbelievable for many. The events overturned and shattered the humanistic values which had underpinned Western thought and the belief that the world was bound to be heading towards a better future. The sheer violence of this conflict, its inextricable links with the Holocaust and the extreme diversity of unparalleled situations that it generated across the globe explain why the Second World War became and remains a major historical, philosophical and cultural reference. Not only have its history and memories been shaped and preserved in countless memoirs, artifacts, archives and museums, acquiring a central presence in contemporary thought and culture , they have also increasingly interested scholars across the Humanities and beyond. A widely shared public fascination with this crucial period also demonstrates that the Second World War is not merely a phenomenon confined to the past: at least in the countries most involved in the conflict, including France, it remains a vivid if not a haunting memory . The long shadow of the Second World War still hangs over us.
However, this long shadow takes on different forms depending on one’s viewpoint in time and space . This is hardly surprising since, after all, ‘World War II was not one war, but a great many small wars’, as Carl Tighe put it (2005, 116). Prompted by past as well as present situations and specificities, different and often diverging memories have emerged in and across countries and communities, at distinct times and via a wide range of media. In France, a key turning point in the memory of the Second World War occurred in the 1970s. Until then, Histoire de Vichy (1954, History of Vichy), written by French historian Robert Aron , had been the standard historical reference on the history of France during the Second World War. In this study, Aron argued that, during the Nazi occupation , Marshal Philippe Pétain , Head of the French State—dubbed ‘Vichy ’ immediately after the arrival and installation of the French government in that town—had acted as a shield for the population, resisting the occupiers’ demands as much as one possibly could. This unproblematic and (conveniently) consensual version of Vichy was shattered in the late 1960s and 1970s when several studies—by historians Henri Michel (1966), Stanley Hoffmann (1968), Eberhard Jäckel (1968) and Robert Paxton (1972)—demonstrated that the Vichy regime had collaborated willingly with the Germans in order for some, like Pétain, to establish a conservative, authoritarian and anti-Semitic regime or for others, like Pierre Laval , to ensure that France would be well-positioned in the nazified Europe that would emerge after the German victory.
A few works have crystallised this major historiographical and memorial turn. In the field of history, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order by American historian Robert Paxton (first published in 1972, translated into French the following year) initially generated much debate before progressively being accepted by the wider scholarly community (cf. Paxton, Chapter “Interview with Robert O. Paxton, on the Writing of History and Ego-history”, infra). Other landmarks demonstrating this memory shift include: the documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969, The Sorrow and the Pity) by Marcel Ophüls , which, focusing on the city of Clermont-Ferrand, illustrated how French men and women responded in very different and evolving ways to the Occupation, from armed resistance to armed collaboration ; Patrick Modiano’s novel La Place de l’étoile (1968, The Place of the Star), which pioneered what would soon be called the mode rétro , a reappraisal of the Second World War in France through narratives that stressed the ambivalences of the time, and not the heroism and Resistance that had so often been the features of narratives from 1945 onwards; and Lacombe Lucien (1974) by Louis Malle , co-written by Modiano, a feature film that may be remembered as the most emblematic work of the aforementioned mode rétro because of the growing influence of cinema in French culture . Paxton, Ophüls, Modiano, Malle and many other scholars, writers and artists fundamentally challenged prevailing or official views that the French—with the exception of a ‘handful of scoundrels’ as De Gaulle put it in a famous radio-broadcast speech given on 8 October 1944—had actively supported or been involved in the Resistance during the war. This dramatic and, for many French, traumatic historiographical and memorial turn (Temkin 2003; Rousso 1990; Laborie 2011) inspired the following generation to stop looking outwards for every evil that had taken place in France during the Second World War and, instead, encouraged them to also look inwards in order to investigate the diverse attitudes that the French adopted and manifested between 1940 and 1945, to question why it had taken almost thirty years for the responsibility of Vichy to be recognised, and to reconsider the Second World War with a renewed critical gaze.
Ego-history: A ‘New Genre for a New Age of Historical Consciousness’ or an ‘Impossible Genre’?
The term ‘ego-history’ was coined by Pierre Nora with the publication of the collective volume Essais d’ego-histoire in 1987, which gathered seven autobiographical essays written by major French historians. In his introduction, Nora defines the ego-history project as:
une expérience […], un exercice [qui] consiste à éclairer sa propre histoire comme on ferait l’histoire d’un autre, à essayer d’appliquer à soi-même, chacun dans son style et avec les méthodes qui lui sont chères, le regard froid, englobant, explicatif qu’on a si souvent posé sur d’autres. D’expliciter, en historien, le lien entre l’histoire qu’on a faite et l’histoire qui vous a faite. (1987, 6–7)
an experiment […], an exercise which involves clarifying one’s own history as one would write the history of another, to try...