The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944

by Stanley Hoffmann (Author), Henry Rousso (Author)

New
Paperback
1994
$42.49

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.

Synopsis

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.

$42.49

Quantity

2 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 398
Edition: Revised ed.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 05 Apr 1994
ISBN 10: 067493539X
ISBN 13: 9780674935396

Media Reviews

Rousso has set out to provide not just another narrative of les annees 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

Author Bio

Henry Rousso is researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Present (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.