The Vichy Syndrome

From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. In this provocative study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation--a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding--has dealt with les années noires. Specifically, he studies what the French have chosen to remember and what have chosen to conceal.








ISBN-13 : 9780674935389
Author : Henry Rousso
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Publication date : 08/28/1991

Editorial Reviews - Library Journal

The traumas of collaboration, resistance, and near civil war during World War II have not yet disappeared in France. This new book by a young French scholar is an interesting and valuable review of the changing ways the French have interpreted the Vichy era. Unlike the many and often conflicting accounts of Vichy, this volume is a history of the memories of that troubled era.

The author contends that the changes reveal cycles of purposeful memories with specific political goals by those who tried to shape interpretation and memory of the past. Rousso finds in these memories a neurosis or the ``Vichy syndrome.'' The result is an era poorly understood even now by the French but one whose memories evoke emotional and passionate responses as revealed by the public reaction to Max Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity or the trial of Klaus Barbie. Strongly recommended for general readers and for scholars in contemporary Europe .--Frank L. Wilson, Purdue Univ., W. Lafayette, Ind.

Meet the Author

Henry Rousso is researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris. Arthur Goldhammer received the French-American Translation Prize in 1990 for his translation of A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.