User:Samteich/sandbox/Résistancialisme

Deconstructing the myth
Shortly after the Général de Gaulle's death in November 1970, a new approach to the History of World War II which was less anxious to write a "récit national" (national narrative) started to emerge.

The emergence of memories
Georges Pompidou who had not been part of the résistance, succeeded De Gaulle to the french presidency in 1969. In a desire to formally end "this time when french people did not love each other", he abandoned the resistancialist tradition. Concomitantly, a new generation affirmed itself after the May 1968 events in France, greatly liberalizing french society.

In 1971, The Sorrow and the Pity by Marcel Ophüls definitively brought to an end to the patriotic myth of mass resistance by depicting a country which wallowed in the collaboration. Time (magazine) wrote that the film punctured "the bourgeois myth—or protectively askew memory—that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans". This was followed in 1972 by the publication of Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert Paxton, which directly challenged the traditional view pioneered by Robert Aron's Histoire de Vichy (1954). Paxton argued that the Vichy government was in fact eager to collaborate with Nazi Germany and did not practice "passive resistance" to German rule. The book was translated into french in 1973 and was welcomed by both communists and the jewish community, while receiving mixed reactions among resistance groups because of the claim that there was no real resistance until 1941.

A late recognition
In the 1970s, the emergence of a memory around the war's anti-Jewish policies led to a first prosecution in France for Crimes against humanity in 1979, 15 years after a law made this crime imprescriptible. Jean Leguay, second in command in the French National Police during the Nazi Occupation of France had been one of the main instigator of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in which 13 152 Jews were arrested and sent into deportation, including 4 000 children. Although Leguay died before the en of the instruction, this prosecution opened a path for the French justice and the trials followed one another in the 1980s. Klaus Barbie was extradited from Bolivia in 1983 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for his role in the roundup of the Izieu Children and the murder of numerous resistants fighters, including Jean Moulin. Paul Touvier was arrested in 1989 and also sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for the execution of 7 jewish hostages at the Rillieux-la-Pape cemetery in 1944. After serving as budget minister under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Maurice Papon was in 1998 convicted of crimes against humanity for his participation in the deportation of more than 1600 jews during the occupation.

Simultaneously emerged the stories of Nazi concentration camps survivors, and the complicity of occupied states in these atrocities. In 1985, Shoah (film) by Claude Lanzmann gave a voice to these former detainees in a 9 hours long documentary. French jews organized themselves in associations like the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France created by Serge Klarsfeld. The 50th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv round up was commemorated in 1992 by François Mitterrand, but it is not until july 1995 that president Jacques Chirac formally recognized the responsibility of the state in the deportation of french jews during the Second World War.