Antisemitism by Levy Richard S. Lindemann Albert S. & Richard S. Levy

Author:Levy, Richard S., Lindemann, Albert S. & Richard S. Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2010-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION: THE DUTY TO MEMORY

As Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis in Anti-Semite and Jew clearly demonstrates, already in 1944 many of the French understood that the horrendous persecutions of the Jews were not simply the excesses of a few fanatics, as was frequently claimed in the postwar years. Rather these crimes were the responsibility of all the French, whose politics of accommodation and complicity had paved the way to a disaster that, before the war, would have seemed inconceivable to most French.

As Anti-Semite and Jew also emphasizes, a great many of the French in the postwar period were intent on forgetting Vichy’s murderous antisemitism for reasons that were in some instances laudable, but in others, cowardly and dangerous. As Sartre stressed repeatedly, such amnesia allowed the blight of antisemitism to once again creep into French public life.

Gradually, this situation began to change. In the early 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s, the veil—to use President George Pompidou’s famous image—that covered the Vichy past began to slip away. Films and novels of the 1970s—most famously, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity and Louis Malle’s fictional cinematic portrait of a collaborator in Lacombe Lucien—began to expose everyday individual complicity in state-sponsored antisemitism, and even voluntary participation in Nazi crimes. By the 1980s, the notion of a devoir de mémoire, a duty to the memory of Vichy’s—and France’s—Jewish victims, began to take hold. The result was a kind of national soul-searching in the 1990s that resulted, most notably, in the trials on charges of crimes against humanity of former collaborators Paul Touvier, a former Militia member, and Maurice Papon, a Vichy civil servant who had ordered the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux during the war and then went on to have an illustrious postwar political career.

In a sense, these brief remarks concerning France’s recent efforts to fulfill a duty to the memory of Jews persecuted and murdered under Vichy bring us full circle. As noted earlier in this chapter, antisemitism is alive and well in certain quarters in France today, even if it is perhaps due to changed reasons and circumstances. Nevertheless, this new antisemitism, running parallel to a duty to the memory of the victims of an earlier French antisemitism, points to a new “schizophrenia” in France where Jews and antisemitism are concerned. Whether and how this schizophrenia resolves itself remains to be seen.

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