The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 [Paperback]

Henry Rousso (Author), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 067493539X | ISBN-13: 978-0674935396 | Publication Date: March 15, 1994

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 study, Henry Rousso examines how this proud nation - a nation where reality and myth commingle to confound understanding - has dealt with "les annees noires", specifically examining what the French have chosen to remember and what they have chosen to conceal.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Rousso has set out to provide not just another narrative of les années noires--the years of defeat, occupation, of the phantom 'French State' and the civil war--but a study of the way the Vichy episode has been perceived and perverted by the French ever since. The result is a brilliant and intemperate book that is also a tract for the times. (The Economist )

Succeeds as a practical demonstration, for a particularly vivid case, of how to study a people grappling with a past. It is remarkable how few similar works there are...One understands a historian's hesitation before the poorly documented and ill-defined wider popular memory as a subject. Rousso shows us, however, how dramatic and revealing this genre can be.
--Robert O. Paxton (New York Review of Books )

This is an original and thought-provoking work, a 'must' for anyone interested in the political and cultural psychology of post-war France.
--Nelly Wilson (Jewish Quarterly )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 15, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067493539X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674935396
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #486,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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