Teaching the Holocaust in French Studies: Questions of Mediation and Experience

Abstract

Since the end of the Second World War, France has had much difficulty confronting the nature of its relationship with Nazism and the Holocaust. During the war France was in the unique and complex position of both collaborating with its Nazi occupiers and being at war with them and then subsequently forming part of the Allied victory over Germany. What Henry Rousso described in 1990 as the “Vichy Syndrome” or the repressed guilt of collaboration at the heart of the French national unconscious has slowly manifested itself and since the 1970s, France has been reassessing its role during the Second World War.¹ A more complex picture of France’s Holocaust experience has emerged over the last thirty years or so as a result of various factors. These include: the changed stance on the part of the French government and the Catholic Church in relation to their account of their actions during the Nazi Occupation; the public debate triggered by the release of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) among other Holocaust and Occupation-related films and documents; the prosecution of high profile war crimes trials and libel cases in France during the 1980s and 1990s, the challenge to the post-war Gaullist construction of France as a nation of resisters and its consequent mythification of France’s wartime record, the public and legal condemnations of Holocaust negationists and the impact of the commemoration of events relating to the Holocaust and the Second World War.