What It Meant to Be "A Jew" in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation

Abstract

In Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 a nos jours, Henry Rousso analyzes conflicted French collective memory of France and describes both attempts of French to flee responsibility for events that occurred during Occupation as well as their struggles to come to terms with them. Rousso defines the syndrome as a kind of collective complex or neurosis growing out of a particularly painful trauma. It is, in his words, the heterogeneous totality of symptoms and manifestations... which reveal existence of a trauma engendered by Occupation and in particular a trauma linked to internal divisions, one which has persisted and at times developed after end of war.1 The trauma and often bitter struggles over memory of it has produced have resulted in what Rousso calls a continuing Franco-French war over French national identity. As Steven Ungar aptly puts it in title of first chapter of Scandal and Aftereffect, which deals in part with Rousso's book, Vichy has become for French nothing less than paradigm of contested memory.