The "Vichy Syndrome" Problem in History

Abstract

Historical interest in the ways World War II has been remembered in France has on occasion in the last decade focused on the concept of a syndrome. As used by its protagonists, the Vichy is a synecdoche for arguments that depict an agonized postwar France somehow attempting to reconcile itself to its history. Vichy, in the language of the Vichy syndrome, has become a metaphor for French collaboration with Nazi genocide. In large measure, the Vichy as a model has been disseminated by Henry Rousso, whose Le Syndrome de Vichy, 1944-198.. was first published in 1987 in France, was republished there in 1990, and appeared in an American translation the next year.' In 1994, together with Eric Conan, Rousso produced Vichy, un passe qui ne passe pas, whose conceptual model of a Vichy was based on the earlier work. The various editions of Le Syndrome de Vichy, together with Vichy, un passe, have helped shape the contours of a continuing discussion of Vichy as syndrome and obsessional and have created an image of a historically unique postwar French retrospective fixation with the Vichy years. Vichy terminology has crossed the Atlan-