History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire: The "Aubrac Affair" and National Memory of the French Resistance

Abstract

Contrary to what one still occasionally reads or hears, the French have not, in recent years, refused to remember the so-called dark of the Vichy regime under German occupation (1940-1944). While the more shameful aspects of Vichy notably, its collaboration with the Germans in the roundup and deportation of seventy-five thousand Jews from French soil was for many years a taboo subject in public discourse as well as in the academy, that is no longer the case. Indeed, some historians have lately deplored the French obsession with memory of the Vichy years. Henry Rousso, in his acclaimed 1987 book The Vichy Syndrome, showed that increasingly after the mid1 970s, Vichy and its turpitudes became a focus of public attention.1 This was aided by a series of highly publicized trials for crimes against humanity, starting with the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, a Nazi functionary notorious for his role in the persecution of resistants and Jews in Lyon, and ending with the 1997 trial of Maurice Papon, a highly placed French bureaucrat in charge of the roundup of Jews in Bordeaux.2 It was just a few months before the opening of the Papon trial, in February 1997, that the so-called Aubrac affair burst into the French press, where it occupied considerable attention for over six months and beyond. Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, who enjoyed national and international fame as heroes of the Resistance, were suddenly placed under suspicion of having betrayed their comrades, and in particular the Resistance hero Jean Moulin, fifty-four years earlier. As even this onesentence summary suggests, the Aubrac affair raises fascinating issues about the history and memory of the Resistance in France. It also raises important issues about narrative, in particular about what I call narrative desire: on the one hand, the desire for heroic aggrandizement (or for its opposite, the toppling of heroes); on the other hand, the desire for narrative coherence and plausibility, or what in fiction is called verisimilitude.