The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944

"Exactly right. It’s been an immensely influential book, and de Gaulle plays a role. Rousso is still a very active historian today, and continues to write extraordinarily interestingly and importantly about memory. One of his other books is called The Haunting Past . Vichy Syndrome, Haunting Past … Un passé qui ne passe pas is another one. It is a past that the French cannot escape from. The fascination of his book is the way in which the French are still trying to come to terms with that experience of 1940 to 1944. One of the narrative arcs of the Vichy Syndrome is the gradual disintegration of the Gaullist myth, the myth that was created by the war memoirs discussed above and that reaches a kind of paroxysm in 1964 when de Gaulle, under the patronage of André Malraux , his minister of culture, has the remains of the great Gaullist war hero, Jean Moulin, transferred to the Panthéon, where the heroes of the French Republic lie. The pantheonization of Moulin produced one of André Malraux’s most famous speeches. Malraux’s narrative is that, without Moulin, the resistance would have just been fragmented and ineffective and quarrelsome and divided but that, sent by de Gaulle, Moulin federates, unites the resistance behind de Gaulle. So the pantheonization of Moulin with this extraordinary speech by Malraux, is the culmination of the Gaullist myth which the memoirs had started. Rousso explores the reasons why the French gradually – but particularly after ’68 – can no longer believe in that myth. Perhaps they never believed it, but they at least said they believed it. He plots how in film and literature, in public debate, the Gaullist myth is shattered. One of his chapters is called ‘the shattered mirror.’ One of the important stories that de Gaulle tells in his war memoirs is how, when he arrives back in Paris on 25 August 1944, he goes to the ministry of war, to the old office he had occupied in June 1940. He says, ‘I went in and opened the door and not a stick of furniture had been changed, the curtains were the same curtains, the chairs were the same chairs, nothing was missing except the state. I sat down and got to work.’ The point he’s making is that Vichy had never existed. Later that afternoon, he crosses the river and he goes to meet the resistance, who are waiting to greet him at the Hotel de Ville, which is just opposite the river from the ministry of war. He arrives, and they all cheer him and he gives an extraordinarily moving and wonderful speech. But then the leader of the resistance council, Georges Bidault, says, ‘Now you’re back in Paris, now you can declare the republic restored.’ And de Gaulle says, ‘No, I can’t, because the republic has never ceased to exist.’ In other words, wherever de Gaulle was, the republic was. So if you fast forward to the debates in the 1990s and 2000s, then if France was really in London, and a French state didn’t exist between 1940 and 1944 except in London, the terrible things that happened weren’t done by France. They were done by the Germans. And so when you deal with the death of 75,000 Jews, who’s to blame? The official Gaullist answer was ‘Germany’. Obviously there were some collaborators, and there were bad individuals, but ‘France’ was not responsible. It took Jacques Chirac, who became president in 1995, to say publicly from the first time, on the anniversary of the biggest roundup of Jews in Paris in July 1942, that, on that day, ‘France’ committed an ‘irreparable’ act. It was French gendarmes who were arresting the Jews, and French train drivers who were driving the trains that took them to the border. It’s probably the only thing he’ll ever be remembered for. As president for ten years he did absolutely nothing except make one speech, which everybody remembers. And he could do this because he had no stake in that past. Macron has gone even further. He pushed the guilt of France even further. So I chose Rousso because these debates are all about the Gaullist legacy, whether the Gaullist story is a story that we can still accept or not. Some old Gaullists were shocked by what Chirac said. I know very respectable and distinguished French historians — of the left actually — who think that Chirac should not have made that speech, that it was, in a sense, undermining the legitimacy of de Gaulle. They worry about that. I think there generally is now a consensus on this, but when people start to think hard about it, how it works, how it fits into revering de Gaulle. You can revere de Gaulle, just say he was not France, but the whole point of de Gaulle’s analysis was that Vichy didn’t exist, it was just a parenthesis, it just didn’t exist, it was nothing, it was just a handful of puppets. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The French are still finding ways to deal with this issue because, if it was France, then it makes the French worry about what kind of country they are that could do such a thing. In France, it seems to me, it’s a question of squaring circles, of still being able to be proud of being French while accepting that the myth was a myth. This was very clear in Chirac’s own speech. On one level France committed irreparable acts, but then France was saved by the Just, les Justes , those gentiles who saved Jews, celebrated by Israel. And increasingly, there seems to be a new myth growing up that almost every French was a Juste . A film that came out a few years ago, La Rafle , the Roundup, had a huge success. And the line of the Rafle is that Pétain, Laval, the bad people did exist, and let’s not pretend they didn’t exist, and let’s not pretend they weren’t the state, but luckily every French shopkeeper, policeman, baker, bus driver saved a Jew here, helped a Jew there, so you see it’s a new way of getting around that problem. So my answer to your question is, although I don’t think the Macron statement in itself is controversial, dealing with that past remains complicated and still is argued over. I think the way the French think about that past now undermines certain of the myths about de Gaulle. So we have this paradoxical situation where everybody in France reveres de Gaulle, but nobody actually believes the Gaullist myth any longer. It’s a curious paradox. Yes I think there’s something in that word ambition. One of de Gaulle’s other key words we haven’t mentioned which is a key word of the war memoirs, “France cannot be France without its grandeur.” Sometimes he was asked, ‘What is grandeur?’ He really wasn’t some kind of unhinged maniac who thought that France was going to become a world power. He was deeply realistic about the realities of the world. He often replied that grandeur was an ambition to surpass yourself. It’s about wanting to try to be something even if you can’t quite get there. And yes the French do have this idea. I think this period is particularly troublesome for the French precisely because they do have a certain idea of what France is, and that period seems to go against all those ideas, if they were guilty. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter De Gaulle once said, ‘there’s a two thousand year pact between France and the liberty of the world.’ He was able to talk that talk about France and freedom and so on. But there was a paradox in de Gaulle. Fundamentally, de Gaulle was a nationalist. He believed all nations are engaged in a struggle for power with other nations. That’s Darwinian, it’s part of the world and it will never change. So he always talked about Russia, because communism would come and communism would go, but Russia would always be there. And he would always say about America that American talk of liberal internationalism was just a cloak for American interest. He was absolutely consistent about that. All ideologies are just cloaks for the interests of nations. But he wasn’t totally consistent when it came to France. If I ever had dinner with de Gaulle, the one question I’d like to ask him is: “You have a very coherent and very clear view of the relationship between ideology and nation. But you also say that France represents a certain idea of humanism, of universal values of humanism for the world, and that France is a light of the world. If you believe all these things are just cloaks for national ambition, do you really believe that? Or are you saying that because you’re French?” The Vichy regime is so difficult for the French to deal with, because it seems to be an assault on so much of what the French are supposed to think being French is about."