France’s ‘unfinished mourning’: the liberation, a historic trial and a controversial literary renaissance

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ABSTRACT Golsan's essay focuses on two recent works that together shed considerable light on the divisions—political, cultural and artistic—that marked France's emergence from the Second World War and the so-called ‘dark years' of Vichy and Nazi dominance of a defeated and humiliated nation. Julian Jackson's France on Trial offers a compelling account of the trial for treason of Vichy's Head of State, Marshal Philippe Pétain, the First World War hero turned Nazi collaborator. As Jackson demonstrates, Pétain's trial exposed not only the deep political and cultural divisions that led to France's 1940 defeat; it also exposed postwar divisions exacerbated not only by the memory of that 1940 defeat but also by new political divisions that would shape the postwar period. Marc Dambre's Génération Hussards traces the rise of a new generation of right-wing writers, exploring their literary works as well as their efforts to rehabilitate established writers compromised by collaborationism during the war. Through a discussion of the literary and cultural reviews this new generation founded, Dambre also demonstrates that postwar France was intellectually and artistically less dominated by figures like Camus and Sartre and the philosophies and ‘engaged literature’ they championed than is often assumed.