Paradoxes of Remembrance: Dissecting France’s “Duty to Memory”

Abstract

In September 1994, a scandal erupted in France over troubling new revelations concerning the nature and duration of Socialist President François Mitterrand’s service to the collaborationist and pro-Nazi Vichy regime during the Second World War. Commenting on the hue and cry produced by these revelations, the American historian Robert Paxton wryly observed that “Vichy stirs the French public more than either money or sex.”¹ At the time Paxton’s tongue-in-cheek remark referred to the fact that the French seemed more shocked by what he described as “Mitterrand’s politics of fifty years ago” than they were by other, more recent revelations concerning the president and his personal life, including the fact that Mitterrand had an illegitimate daughter and that financial corruption had marked the later years of his presidency. But given the broader realities of 1990s France, Paxton’s observation had a much wider application. It served to underscore the power and pervasiveness of the memory of Vichy, of the so-called Dark Years, in French public life and to stress the capacity of that memory to disturb and unsettle the nation’s moral conscience.