Abstract
‘One cannot manhandle time as one will’ (p. 18). This statement, written in 1945 by Jean d’Arcy, an official in the post-war Ministry of Prisoners, Deportees and Refugees in the French Provisional Government, sums up succinctly a difficulty at the heart of the story Olivier Wieviorka tells so skilfully in his Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from the Liberation to the Present. Despite a more or less activist stance vis-à-vis wartime memory, the French state in fact had limited success in shaping public memory from the end of the conflict into the twenty-first century. Even in the immediate post-war period, when there was some success by the state and other political actors in articulating generally consensual interpretations of the ‘Dark Years’ of 1940–44 among certain constituencies (de Gaulle and the communists, though their ‘accepted version’ of events of course diverged significantly), this came at a cost. As Wieviorka notes, this sort of operation of seeking to ‘impose a meaning on lived experience’ all too often comes ‘at the risk of presenting a travesty of the facts or even the essence of that experience’ (p. 35). And the bill often comes due later, paid in controversy and painful reckonings between memory and truth.
Wieviorka tells a story that is resolutely political. Accordingly the book’s six chapters proceed chronologically and each focuses on a more or less discrete political regime: the Provisional Government, 1944–6; the Fourth Republic, 1946–58; de Gaulle’s years in power during the Fifth Republic, 1958–69; the presidencies of Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, 1969–81; the Mitterrand years, 1981–95; and the presidencies of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. Yet though the author is very clear that his is a ‘political history’ and a ‘study of public policy’, he may not give his work enough credit for integrating social and cultural factors into the narrative. It is true that the book does not explore in exhaustive detail the ways that film, literature, family memories, and historical research have influenced collective memory of the Second World War in France, but the author does give due attention to the ways these informed political debates, and in particular how the state and other political actors reacted to them. And Wieviorka is indeed sensitive to how, at key moments of transformation, the ‘mnemonic landscape’ (p. 113), as he puts it, changed in response to generational turnover, economic difficulties, identity crises, and other broader social and cultural trends.
The author amply and convincingly documents his primary arguments. First, French memory of the Second World War has been fragmented since the very end of the conflict. Second, this has been due to the numerous and wide variety of experiences of French people during the war and their mobilization as interest groups in the years afterward: as Jews marked for persecution, deportation, and murder; as prisoners of war; as communists variously suffering persecution and undertaking resistance; as members of one of the many Resistance groups; as collaborators with the Nazis and Vichy; as either willing or forced labourers in Germany; as members of the mass of the French people who accommodated themselves to everyday life by negotiating among contradictory pressures at different times during the war years. Third, government officials’ ability to impose their preferred versions of public memory was in the end most often limited to arbitrating among competing demands and memories. Ultimately, Wieviorka reaffirms the importance of broader social and cultural factors in shaping collective perceptions of the past by noting that memory ‘functions only when the arguments presented embody collective sentiments: the bottom-up wins out over the top-down’ (p. 175). He contrasts the fragmentation and strife associated with memory and the Second World War with the ‘unifying and integrating qualities’ (p. 7) of public memory of the Great War. This may be a slight exaggeration, since memories and supposed lessons of that earlier conflict certainly did roil the contentious politics of the 1920s and 1930s, but there is no denying that both victory and the more or less common experience (for men) of soldiering during that war helped smooth over disagreements about its meanings. Wieviorka invokes a powerful symbol when he notes that the state commemorated the First World War with a single tomb of an unknown soldier and an eternal flame in the heart of Paris, while a similar effort to commemorate the Second World War required 15 coffins to represent different constituencies, and the Croix de Lorraine that watched over them did so in the comparatively remote location of Mont Valérien.
Divided Memory is well written and clear (for which both the author and translator no doubt deserve credit), and the book is an outstanding guide to its subject for novices and specialists alike. It is rather strange and unfortunate, however, that Stanford University Press chose not to include an index, which would seem helpful, even indispensable, in such a detailed work of political history. Nonetheless, anyone interested in French history during the twentieth century or in the study of memory, in general or in relation to the Second World War in particular, will profit immensely from reading this study.