Wartime France: Remembering Vichy

Abstract

Although less publicized, 1990 was a year that brought as many historical anniversaries in France as did 1989. A massive apotheosis held at UNESCO in November commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of de Gaulle's birth-and the twentieth anniversary of his death. As part of that ceremony the founding of the Free French movement fifty years before received attention, although de Gaulle's war years and his act of defiance in 1940 became somewhat lost amid the profusion of testimonials and studies devoted to his later career. In a very different fashion, 1990 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Vichy government, which was the theme for an international conference devoted to Regime de Vichy et les francais, held under the auspices of the Centre national de recherche scientifique and the Institut d'histoire du temps present in Paris in June. The IHTP conference assembled an international panel of sixty historians to explore recent trends in research on Vichy. The published results of the IHTP conference enables some appreciation of the way a postwar generation of French scholars has confronted a troubling past and has placed the memory of Vichy alongside other traumatic and contested periods of French history. Once neglected, the history of wartime France, particularly the memory of Vichy, has become a central focus for several younger scholars associated with the Institut d'histoire du temps present and its publication, Vingtieme Siecle, and many of them are represented in Vichy et les francais. The conference proceedings mark a milestone along the way back to Vichy, following by twenty years the results of an earlier colloquium on Vichy, organized by Rene Remond and Janine Bourdin, published as Le Gouvernement de Vichy, 1940-1942, and