Complicity and memory in soldiers’ testimonies of the Algerian war of decolonisation in Esprit and Les Temps modernes

The Algerian war of decolonisation and the French intellectual Battle

The Algerian war – only officially recognised as a war in France in 1999 – extended from 1954 through the escalation of the conflict by Guy Mollet’s socialist government from 1956, the toppling of the Fourth Republic and General de Gaulle’s assumption of the Presidency in 1958, to its conclusion in 1962. Colonised from 1830, Algerian society was rigidly polarised between pied-noirs European settlers and the majority indigenous Algerians. The conflict gave rise to notorious violence both on the part of the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN) and the French military. The violence of the latter, especially because of its use of torture, gave rise to a whole infrastructure of dissent. This targeted the government and its system of censorship, state TV and other media supportive of the cause of French Algeria, but also an institutionalised left in Mollet’s SFIO and the French Communist Party, which appeared gravely lacking at this historic moment. In this way, the war was brought into question in different forms and degrees, ranging from critique of methods to a more thoroughgoing interrogation of French colonialism per se. Means varied from exposés and editorials to publication of testimonies or letters from participants, including such notable examples as General Jacques Pâris de Bollardière’s explosive letter published in L’Express in March 1957, which lent his resistance credentials to the condemnation of current French military repression, or the publication in February 1958, quickly banned, of French-Algerian journalist Henri Alleg’s La Question. Smuggled out of prison and published by Editions de Minuit – set up as a Resistance institution under the Occupation – Alleg’s account of his torture by French paratroopers made a strong impact on the French public. His untypical case as a European subjected to this treatment posed questions of historical responsibility and complicity; as did his Communist affiliations – one of his torturers even admiringly recounted stories he had heard about the bravery of Communist resisters holding out through torture under the Nazi Occupation.

There were significant similarities between Esprit and Les Temps modernes. Both were strongly anchored in the experience of the Occupation during the Second World War. Yet, the overarching application of the leftist label to the two journals obscures as much as it clarifies. Recent scholarship has reiterated the limits of such designations; Darcie Fontaine’s important recent work, DECOLONIZING CHRISTIANITY, for instance, draws out the multi-layered complexities of anti-colonialism as a body of thought and action in France and Algeria during decolonisation. This insight suggests itself to this discussion as Esprit was the principle outlet of Christian personalism and, following the Liberation of France, aligned itself with left politics, but as a perceived strengthening, rather than dilution of, its Christian commitment. Les Temps modernes’ origins were even more visibly rooted in the French experience of the Second World War, appearing first in October 1945, and expressly launched in the Resistance spirit of forging a new society out of the old. It was closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre but also included on its board diverse intellectual luminaries before Cold War fractures led to a narrowing of editorial perspectives, certainly in comparison with Esprit.

This conjuncture of the Liberation led into overt and strong political commitment and an anti-colonial orientation in the two journals, first with respect to France’s war in Indochina, and then the Algerian war, during which they were early and strong advocates of negotiation (Da Silva, 1991: 276–277, 286). The two outlets both enjoyed a political and intellectual reach disproportionate to modest circulation figures of around 10,000 (Christofferson, 2004: 77n40). By comparison, Paris-Match – whose focus on FLN violence occupied central terrain in the contest over the representation of the war – had an average print run of around one and half million as of September 1955 (Kuby, 2011: 327). However, government targeting, including censorship and seizure, of outlets like these two journals, and the contempt which the French military voiced against them, are suggestive of their perceived leverage over key sections of opinion. Likewise, the military’s preoccupation with such critical outlets was indicated by explicit instructions to soldiers not to speak out on their return lest they fuel critical intellectuals or Communists, and those who did so while still on service faced punishment (Narayanan, 2016: 54).

Important differences existed between the two journals, however, which bore on their respective use of soldiers’ testimonies. First, their common roots in the spirit of the Resistance and Liberation resonated differently. Whereas for Esprit, the Resistance represented patriotic sentiment, for Les Temps modernes, it was foremost a combat against fascism in all its hues (Da Silva, 1991: 313). The publication of testimonies from 1957 corresponded to turning points for both journals, in large part coming out of the aftermath of the Soviet crushing of the Budapest uprising in October to November 1956, but also in the case of Esprit overlapping with the rise of a new generation at the outlet. Les Temps modernes put critical distance between itself and the Soviet Union, shifting its horizons and hopes to an internationalist socialism whose orientation in the Third World might overcome its Stalinist disappointments in Europe. At Esprit, Domenach determined the moment to be opportune for a return to reflection and questioning of easy syntheses, Manichean conceptions of capitalism, totalising systems, philosophies of history, and political ideologies (Da Silva, 1991: 301–302).

In considering variations between the testimonies published in the two journals, then, it is important to bear in mind that these backgrounds translated into differing conceptions of solidarity and action as the stakes of awakened imagination and memory. Les Temps modernes, for instance, was much more unequivocally of the view that anti-colonialism presupposed Algerian independence, hostility to de Gaulle’s government, the appropriateness of troop desertion and refusal of conscription, and of support for the FLN (which came to a head over the discovery and 1960 trial of the porteurs de valises – French men and women who aided the FLN).

Soldiers’ testimonies

The importance de Beauvoir put on soldiers’ testimonies contrasted with their relative rareness; no more than around 15 individual testimonies or collections of testimonies appeared in Esprit, and fewer still in Les Temps modernes. These were supplemented by reviews or commentaries on testimonies published elsewhere. Letters from soldiers were also prominent, fulfilling the same testimonial function in truncated form. No testimonies appeared in either journal before 1957, at which point their use peaked through to 1958, overlapping with but by no means all deriving from the Battle of Algiers, in which the brutal but pyrrhic French victory was so famously represented in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 eponymous film. Their publication thereafter continued less frequently through to 1962. Some testimonies were anonymous, others were named but have left no other significant historical trace, so that it is difficult to draw conclusions about the priorities and attitudes of the author. However, unless heavily edited, they were obviously penned by soldiers with significant cultural capital. Others were by veterans who were or became well-known anti-colonial militants, notably Georges Mattéї and Robert Bonnaud, or intellectuals like Jean-François Steiner (1962). ³

This raises the question of the supposed representativeness of the accounts. Some of the most important lines dividing the French army in North Africa were social and intellectual, between those who had benefitted from education and brought political experience and moral conviction, and those on the other hand whose literacy and political culture were limited (Narayanan, 2016: 44). Marked political savvy or cultural sophistication distinguishes many of these testimonies from those examined in core works on veterans from Algeria, such as Claire Mauss-Copeaux’s (1998) oral history, which argues that ‘the history and collective memory specific to a region, more than the colonialist culture of the era, structured individual memories and figured in representations of the Algerian War’ (p. 281). Jean-Charles Jauffret’s (2011) study of conscripts in Algeria, on the other hand, focuses on veterans’ memories in the 1980s and 1990s, which differ from the sense of political immediacy characteristic of the testimonies in these two journals. Similarly, the time lapse between the war and the interviews with French supporters of the FLN gives the accounts of Martin Evans’ (1997) interviewees a reflective quality that contrasts with the testimonies in these journals. Whereas the former draws out fascinating material on formative influences, including the private realm of family background, these testimonies by contrast generally focused much more on the political immediacy of current events.

The concentration of testimonies around 1957–1958 derived in the first instance from the fact that the first conscripts only returned then, as well as an upsurge in outrage that the socialist Mollet government had escalated the war and increased conscript numbers accordingly, and the concentration and exposure of French counter-insurgency in the Battle of Algiers. Tellingly, Les Temps modernes included soldiers’ testimonies in its indictment of Mollet, ‘He disgraces the name of socialism’, in its June 1957 edition (Anon, 1957). ⁴ The decline in printed testimonies thereafter might also be explained by Oliver Todd’s (1958) assertion in his own testimony that protests of all kinds by soldiers were diminishing by 1958 due to a sense of resignation and passive acceptance that paralleled public opinion generally. They complain but no longer demonstrate, he lamented (p. 829). Narayanan reminds us that it is important to factor in the change in outlook of conscripts mobilised in 1961 or 1962 compared with those in 1956 to 1958. The former had years to observe the evolution of the war and declining support in metropolitan France, while those mobilised earlier had few political opinions to frame their service (Narayanan, 2016: 50). And crucially, Emma Kuby (2011) suggests that faith in the power of testimonies started to wane later in the war, so that editorial energies were shifted to rethinking appropriate forms of anti-colonial action. In turn, the increasing subscription of the left to the reworked narrative of ‘the invention of decolonization’, culminating in 1962, rendered testimonies less urgent or valuable than interventions specifically promoting negotiation and cessation of hostilities (Shepard, 2006).

Similarly, the greater questioning of the moral authority of soldiers as the war dragged on may have rendered their testimonies less useful, or at least less shocking (Narayanan, 2016: 91). Notwithstanding, the mobilisation of these resources in these two journals might be likened to Michel de Certeau’s concept of détournement – a hijacking or diversion of the prestige accorded to soldiers in order to throw into relief and raise critical consciousness of precisely what the French army was doing. The use of such testimonies, then, was comparable to the polemic form, not only purporting to describe the world but also intervening in it to change it. Unlike the polemic, however, their authority as texts derived not from the forcefulness of prose but from the presumed veracity and respect accorded to their firsthand testimony. ⁵ This underlay the perceived clout of the soldier’s message to cut through the complicity via passivity or indifference of a French public inattentive to what was being done in its name. That so many were personally involved via the system of conscription (Branche, 2001: 145; Dosse, 2012: 132) was an additional advantage of the soldier’s testimony – not only to inform French people but to induce it to react appropriately to the information it did receive. Tellingly, Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1986) recalled that public debates about the war made little impact on public opinion in France until the emergence of the testimonies of the first returnee soldiers (p. 14).

Testimonies, military culture, and the emergence of the memory of complicity

One attraction of the published testimonies for the editorial staff of Les Temps modernes and Esprit was surely their powerful representation and indictment of military culture and processes of socialisation of the army in Algeria. This reinforced the claim that the degradation of the French soldier mirrored that of the French society that he embodied and was expressed in sufficiently arresting language and style to call into question its passivity and complicity.

In addition, though, I argue that these aspects of the testimonies foreshadowed the trope of complicity memory that would in later decades be employed as a fundamental parameter in reworking the memory of Vichy France. The grey zone of Vichy that Rousso and others (Burrin, 1996; Ott, 2016; Wieviorka, 2012: 141) have pointed to has involved thinking beyond heroes and villains to a broader typology of intermediate positions of complicity and compromise, including accomplices, bystanders, beneficiaries, or witnesses; thinking of good and evil less as individual characteristics than abstract properties (Cento Bull and Hansen, 2016); the debilitating effects of ambivalence and uncertainty; and the systemic bases of complicity in violence and oppression.

Emphasis on foreshadowing here is important, and requires being alert to the cardinal historiographical sins of teleology or doing history backwards (Cooper, 2005). Moreover, it suggests Henry Rousso is hasty to argue that the result of the contestation over the use of the memory of the Resistance and collaboration during the Algerian war was that ‘people were reminded of the fact that the choice between resistance and collaboration was insufficient to capture the true complexities of the divisions that existed in France during the Occupation’. The example of these testimonies, at least, suggests that the reconceptualization of Vichy in terms, as Rousso puts it, of ‘dirty grays’ remained unarticulated as such at the time of the Algerian War. It did not override the ‘master narrative’ of Vichy France of heroes and victims (Rousso, 1991: 75, ix; Kalter, 2016: 110). Such was the enduring centrality of the patriotic sentiment in Esprit’s almost triumphalist reference to the Resistance as a guiding memory in its editorial ‘Relais’ in November 1957, or Domenach’s ‘Algérie: Propositions raisonnables’ in May of the same year. Likewise, Sartre’s illustration in his commentary on Des Rappelés témoignent of complicity with reference specifically to the German, not French, people at the time of the Occupation is symptomatic. ¹² Furthermore, there is at best a tenuous line of descent between, say, Domenach’s invocation of the greyness of complicity and later discourse about the grey zone of Vichy, since components of memory discourse dispense with certain elements, conjoin or are articulated with others, or are even remoulded unrecognisably over time. This accommodates historian Enzo Traverso’s (2016) contention that today’s discourse about the grey zone of Vichy largely developed out of a trend of thinking defined by the rejection of anti-fascism in its mid-twentieth century configuration, of which he points to precisely Esprit and Les Temps modernes as emblematic (pp. 3, 5–6, 274).

These testimonies suggest the aptness of historian Donald Reid’s (2007) observation about Alleg’s La Question, which applies well to their foregrounding of collective complicity in just such ways. To borrow Reid’s words, they ‘prepared the way for the French to confront later the Vichy Syndrome accusation that, during the Occupation, the French had participated then in what the Germans were doing’ (p. 585). They did so in a different manner, however, and what they lacked in the high profile of Alleg’s (and Bollardière’s) account they compensated for in more extensive, albeit not unproblematic, explanations of the complex bases of complicity. Reading Alleg’s account, one is thrown into a surreal world of fully-formed torturers; the testimonies in Les Temps modernes and Esprit put greater emphasis how normal young Frenchmen could become torturers. Part of the power of Alleg’s account is its depiction of the hellishly disorienting character of the torture centre – for instance, one does not quite know what to make of the soldiers’ open anti-republicanism and fascism. Conversely, in these testimonies, there is arguably a soberer quality to the way inculcation and normalisation of violence was facilitated by the systemic and situational basis of the French military in North Africa.

How were soldiers’ testimonies in the two journals indicative of this emerging memory trope of complicity? Which is to ask, what explanations were proffered which would resonate in later thinking about Vichy that remained unarticulated as such here? One can identify three closely connected points: (1) The notion of it being a slippery slope for enlisted soldiers’ imagination to falter to the point of it being unremarkable to enact violence, (2) the depiction of the military or military culture not simply as depraved but as stupid, and (3) broader claims about how institutions or social formations are conducive to reprehensible comportment by otherwise quite normal people.

In the April 1959 Esprit, Pierre Leulliette (1959) remarked in ‘Aventures d’un parachutiste’ that ‘the army forms men. Yes, but for every one it forms – often without him knowing – how many are actually deformed?’ (p. 562). In that vein, the testimonies frequently suggested a considerably coherent view of the socialisation and regimentation within the army that had become clear during the Algerian war. This connected in turn to the relation between imagination and violence. It was for that very reason that exposing the socialisation of troops was a key priority in many of the testimonies.

Testimonies in both journals consistently represented military regimentation as a spectrum running from discipline in the sense of an externally felt command to obey, to an internalisation of the military’s values much more akin to Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of habitus, in which the institutional culture and dispositions are naturalised to a much greater degree. This ran parallel to a perceived distinction between, at one end, well-meaning, often naive, fresh young conscripts, and, at the other end, hardened careerist officers and those conscripts who had been moulded in their image over the course of their military service.

Crucially, that shift on the scale implied a dulling, even deadening, of the imagination, particularly in the sense that David Graeber (2015) terms ‘imaginative identification’. By this he means the interpretative labour, the continual work of trying to understand the Other. This debilitation of imagination in turn connected to the profoundly entrenched culture of gratuitous violence that was pointed to, making appelés and rappelés complicit but primarily generated by the careerist officer core. Accordingly, the representation of the violence of the French army in these testimonies often did not so much take to task the justification of soldiers on the ground, but rather highlighted that they often did not offer – or, more precisely, they felt no need to offer – anything like a considered justification at all. Indicative of this trend were frequent references to a drunkenness on power, a sort of nonchalance or numbness towards violence rather than a defence or justification of it.

In his 1957 account of the culture of ‘Gestapo-ism’ in the French army in Algeria, Mattéï (1957) recalled that when he and other young Frenchmen of 20 years of age arrived,

there was a wide gap between those young soldiers that fear, racism, desire for vengeance and the myth of the ‘fighter’ maintained by Captain B … had transformed into true soldiers, and the rest of us, who hadn’t yet understood what kind of breeding ground we’d been thrown into.

He described his astonishment at the inculcation of torture as a reflex, and at the experience of seeing young conscripts talking casually about torture, and the

total lack of reserve of these young soldiers, all younger than me, conscripted for more than a year, some for two years. I was stupefied to see how all ‘these brave ordinary peasants of France’ were in on it. Apparently, they evolved in this atmosphere without feeling its horribleness. True soldiers. The career officers did a fine job. (pp. 139, 145–146)

Another characteristic claim of these soldiers’ accounts was an emphasis of the slipperiness of the slope towards the thorough-going internalisation of the French army’s debased operational culture, both in terms of the proportion of conscripts who succumbed to it, and in terms of the unsettling speed with which they did so. Pucheu (1957) insisted that torture was not exceptional at all; on the contrary, it had become perfectly normalised. And just as its institutionalisation was disturbingly quick, so there was a parallel and deeper concern that permeated the soldiers’ testimonies regarding how slippery was the slope for young soldiers in terms of the internalisation and naturalisation of violence. In large part for this reason, Pucheu expressed the common sentiment that ‘the question which above all must make us reflect, and which touches me personally the most, is the moral situation of my comrades from the contingent’ (p. 444).

One sees equivalent concerns in Mattéï’s (1957) account, as he remarked that ‘from a slap to torture was just a question of a few months’. For him, ‘the most serious thing was what had become of these young conscripts that I’d spent six months with after twelve months in the French army: true mercenaries’ (pp. 158–159). Renaux (1957) spoke of a ‘contagion’, and emphasised the contradictory correlation between the rise of racism among troops and the length of pacification being ever extended (p. 558). In ‘X…’’s (1957) ‘Journal de Campagne’, it was noted how certain soldiers felt shame at first, but quickly became accustomed to expectations of violence (p. 161).

Concerns about the degeneration of French youth were here compounded by appeals to how quickly and how many of these young conscripts could be moulded by the institution of the French military. This urgency accentuated the sense of crisis and moral imperative to bring the war to a close. However, the deployment of this argument again came at the cost of marginalising the sufferings of indigenous Algerians, and, again, dubiously, even if unintentionally, portraying French troops as the primary victims of the conflict. The appeal to the imagination of metropolitan opinion was itself constituted by a diminished imagination of the suffering as Algerians in their own right, rather than as a by-product of the primary problem of degenerated French youth, and by extension of the French Republic (cf. Vidal-Naquet, 1986: 11).

Soldiers’ testimonies also pointed to French army violence in North Africa in terms of the foreclosure of thought and imagination; namely, the recurrent depiction of this culture not merely as unjust or cruel, but explicitly as stupid. While individualised indictments in this vein were apparent, there was also a sense in how this was produced institutionally and systemically and was an important factor in facilitating complicity in French violence.

Such claims varied in tenor from claims as to the aimlessness or pointlessness of the war, to those that castigated its full-fledged imbecility. Renaux (1957) pointed to the Quixotism of military life, and insisted that above all the Algerian campaign was ‘bloody stupidity [idiotie]’ (pp. 557, 559). Mattéï (1958) denounced what he summed up as ‘this carousel of idiocy [bêtise]’ (p. 823). Cataloguing French army massacres and other atrocities, Robert Bonnaud (1957a) judged that, ‘such means show the Pacification clearly for what it is, a tragic farce [bouffonnerie], a mystifying farce’ (p. 585). In his account ‘Rencontres en Algérie’, Alain Mouriaux (1958) remarked on the ignorance characteristic of officers and rank and file alike regarding Algerian society. Young officers were particularly singled out – ‘their curiosity is hopeless, their knowledge non-existent’ (p. 801). Leulliette (1959) recollected the much-repeated imperative not to try to understand, the faithful and unconscious compliance with orders, the stupid inhumanity of and the imbecilic cruelty of certain comrades (pp. 563, 565, 567). Pucheu (1958) relayed the views of parachutists that if they were indeed behaving absurdly, it was because they were in an absurd situation (p. 446). Many complained about the culture of anti-intellectualism; Tahon (1958) lamenting that the stupidity of officers was increasingly intolerable (p. 2098). Paul Thibaud (1960), in his March 1960 review of books relating to the war, including soldiers’ testimonies, remarked on the palpable sense of spiritual and intellectual paralysis that characterised the French military campaign. Furthermore, he underlined a distinct kind of wilful stupidity, when he referred to the phenomenon of instructors trying to codify torture and justify it functionally as a fragile barrier against reflection, which would engender responsibility (pp. 606–607). ¹³

However, while we need not discount totally these testimonies’ account of operational stupidity, they are probably better understood as symptomatic of memory of the French left regarding the French army. While not incompatible with Branche’s exposition of the logic of army torture in Algeria, it lacks the precision of her account, focussing on the obsessive requirement to extricate information, and the continual fear among French. More generally, historians of the French army in Algeria point precisely to the weight of intellectual effort and preoccupations of the French army (Peterson, 2015).

This leftist memory grew out of a mythology around the citizens’ army of 1792 and subsequent suggestions of its betrayal in the suppression of the Commune and crystallised around the Dreyfus affair, in turn a key memorial reference (notably for figures like Vidal-Naquet). This foregrounded the argument that the army as an institution was apart from French society, and a possible danger to it (Gildea, 1994: 142). In the face of continuing popular celebration of the army, however, one response was to depict it as ignorant, backward-looking, hidebound – indeed, stupid. This thread continued through the popular new genre of anti-military novels in the late nineteenth century to Jean Jaurès’s 1910 L’Armée nouvelle through to Marc Bloch’s classic compendium of French military bungling in 1940 (published in 1946) to the 1960s tiermondisme of a Gérard Challiot, Pierre Naville, or Guy Debord. At this conjuncture, this tradition was conjoined to adumbrations of complicity that were located in the ambivalence of institutions.

The subtlest examples of these tended to appear in Esprit rather than Les Temps modernes. One illustrative instance was Jean Carta’s (1958) ‘L’Engrenage des responsabilités’ in the May 1958 edition. In this chain of responsibilities in Algeria he lamented that

in 1958 one cannot be Algerian with impunity. Nor can one be an innocent pacifier. Ambivalence [l’équivoque] distorts every one of our acts. Our intentions rebound on us like so many hideous caricatures.

Men of good-will had been distorted into prosecuting this inhuman war as ‘a cog in the repressive machine.’ As for himself, he had ‘woken up a torturer among torturers’. Reluctance to abandon comrades, paralysing uncertainty, and the imperative of duty all overrode proper consideration of ‘the essential ambiguity of situation as oppressors’ (pp. 816–817).

In ‘Une guerre sans lois’ in the same edition, Jacques Guermonprez regretted that even the most apparently inoffensive act that the soldier engages in implicates him as ‘a representative of colonizing force which the Algerians are fighting’. Connecting epistemological and moral grey zones, he noted that ‘it’s the indecisive nature, the ambivalence, the absence of clearly defined objections […] of honest perspectives that give rise to acts of hate and violence’ (Fogel and Guermonprez, 1958: 808).

The pre-figuration of the complicity memory trope in these accounts also anticipated how the language of the grey zone or its equivalents cuts two ways. In this sense, it is instructive that Domenach queried Sartre’s lack of interest in the greyness of human action, since the existentialist prerogatives of Les Temps modernes, while well aware, as we have seen, of the issue of complicity, militated against any kind of alibi for inaction. If on the one hand, Domenach’s invocation of greyness and knots of complicity allowed one to broaden out categories of responsibility beyond clearly delineated villains, on the other it offered a means of exculpation. Sartre had referred to soldiers’ testimonies to counter this ‘guilty innocence’, and Domenach, too, was alert to this risk. In his review (Domenach, 1959) of Pierre Henri Simon’s 1958 testimony Portrait d’un officier, he noted that ‘sin is everywhere and in a way excuses everything – how many have already hidden their responsibility in the anonymity of general guilt!’ (p. 217)

Conclusion

Domenach and de Beauvoir’s invocations of complicity are useful prompts to reconsider how violence, imagination and memory were grappled with during the Algerian War in both Esprit and Les Temps modernes. In turn, the publication of soldiers’ testimonies in these journals is particularly fertile ground for exploring these themes. Memory of the Second World War in these accounts has been examined as a rhetorical means of shocking French sensibilities about a multi-layered national crisis. This was rooted in violence that was precisely so unacceptable because of the perceived legacies, duties, and self-images bequeathed to France by its experience of German occupation. The testimonial form itself was mobilised to overcome barriers to the imaginative prerequisites of responsibility and action among the French public. To this end, it combined the authority of the soldier’s testimony with the leverage of personal connections that linked the French public to young conscripts in Algeria.

Besides mobilising imagination through making a claim for the valuable symbolic resource of memory of the Second World War, many of these testimonies pointed to the problem of debilitated imagination as a basis for the violence they denounced. The testimonies offered a powerful indictment of the rationalisation of violence through military socialisation and what was perceived as an institutional culture of stupidity and a frighteningly slippery slope to complicity in violence that – in a continual back and forth juxtaposition – mirrored the perceived dulling of the imagination of the metropolitan public. It is on this point that interesting angles of engagement can be found with Rousso, Reid and Kalter in terms of the degree to which this fashioned later rethinking of France’s Vichy past. This article has suggested that many of these testimonies manifested the emergence of complicity memory. Or better, recognisable components of thinking about the ‘grey zone’ of Vichy permeated these testimonies but remained unarticulated as such. This precludes, then, any suggestion of a direct line of descent between, for instance, Domenach’s pointing to grey complexity in the Algerian War and those later reconceptualisations of memory of the Second World War experience.

Nonetheless, this does suggest profitable avenues of research with regard to the origins of the emergence or re-emergence of the memory of the grey zone of Vichy. Kalter’s emphasis on the importance of Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France to later receptivity to rethinking Vichy is well taken, but in turn requires understanding their own divergences, connections, and relationships with the memorialisation of these issues as they emerged during French decolonisation. A preliminary condition for such research would include guarding against thinking in terms of uninterrupted lineages, and deepening investigation into how components of memories are shed, picked up and articulated with others, and reworked over time, especially according to the vagaries of political, cultural and ideological moods.