Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France, and: The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (review)

This recent pair of offerings solidifies Richard J. Golsan’s position as one of the preeminent American scholars of Vichy, one of the richest and fastest-growing fields in French Cultural Studies. As the subtitle of Vichy’s Afterlife indicates, Golsan’s interests lie not in the history of France’s “dark years” per se, but rather in the ever-contested, highly malleable, and hotly politicized historiography of the Occupation.

Vichy’s Afterlife, a collection of essays written since 1993, adopts an episodic approach to retrace postwar France’s collective “working through” of its participation in the Holocaust and to assess the impact that participation has had on the nation’s attitude toward–and damaged legacy of–human rights. Though linked by a common theme, the episodes and texts analyzed vary widely, ranging from high-profile legal proceedings (the Bousquet, Touvier, and Papon trials) to influential films (Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus) and books (Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder and Pierre Péan’s controversial biography of Mitterrand, Une jeunesse française), to the dynamics of contemporary intellectual discourse (Holocaust negationism and responses to contemporary genocide in the Balkans).