After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France by Philip Nord

Abstract

The historical literature about the memory of the Occupation in France is immense. Since Rousso’s pioneering study, the accepted narrative was that for twenty-five years after 1945, the French lived a consoling Gaullist myth that France had been a nation of resisters.1 This myth not only underplayed the role of collaboration, but its focus on the heroes of the resistance marginalized the experiences of the Holocaust victims: Jews who tried to tell their story were ignored. This heroic narrative, so the argument goes, shattered at the end of the 1960s in the wake of the upheavals of May 1968 and the Six Day War. Increasingly the Holocaust, and Vichy’s role in it, has come to dominate French collective memory.This interpretation has been much contested in recent years, especially, as Azouvi has dubbed it, the “myth of silence” regarding the Holocaust.2 Nord’s new book is a distinguished contribution to this revisionist literature. As he says at the outset, “This will not be a history of the silence-to-voice narrative” (7). He shows that the shadow of deportation, and of the concentration camps, was pervasive in France after 1945. But he distinguishes that deportation memory from the memory of the Holocaust; it focused primarily on resistance deportees who “emblematized the wartime tribulation of the nation as a whole” (230). This does not mean that no Jewish voices were heard: “There was a distinctive Jewish voice in the post-war remembrance of the Deportation” (162). This voice, however, had to find its place in the wider deportation narrative. To the extent that there was ever a “Gaullist myth,” Nord sees it as most prevalent not immediately after the war but in the 1960s during Charles de Gaulle’s presidency. The result was that the post-1968 generation believed that it was discovering for the first time a story that had already been told in different ways during the two decades after the Liberation.The importance of Nord’s subtle book is less his re-writing of a narrative that has already been challenged than his careful attention to the complexity of the debates around the memory of deportation. Three themes stand out. First, he shows that the memory of deportation was never homogeneous. He carefully distinguishes between, for example, the Communist reading of deportation from that of the camp survivor David Rousset, who invented the term “concentrationary universe” in his L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946). Nord’s second originality is to pay careful attention to the dialogues between Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in the decades after the war. His analysis of the anguished debates between Catholics like Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, and Michel Riquet and Jewish writers like Elie Wiesel and Jules Isaac is one of the most illuminating features of this book. Although Maritain’s attempt to incorporate the Holocaust into a Christian salvific framework—a sacrifice that was also part of humanity’s struggle to redemption—was unacceptable to Jewish spokesmen, it did at least help to open a debate about the meaning of the Holocaust.Thirdly, Nord examines the debates about how to represent the deportation experience in literature, film, and painting, and how to memorialize it in monuments. Nord offers subtle analyses of the gestation, conception, and symbolic meanings of several key monuments, such as the Struthof Monument in Alsace and the Deportation Memorial on the Ile de la Cité in Paris. In regard to the Mémorial du Marty Juif inconnu (now the Mémorial de la Shoah), he shows that even though the monument had universalizing aspirations—part of French Jews’ desire to show that they belonged to the national community—this perspective must not blind us to the “affirmative Jewishness of the tomb” (185).This rich, nuanced, and often moving book uses a wide range of sources and methods—literary criticism, art history, and an analysis of philosophical debates—to make a major contribution to our understanding of how the French have remembered one of the most painful periods in their history.