Henry Rousso

History and Memory in France Since 1944

The Vichy Syndrome

From the Liberation purges to the Barbie trial, France has struggled with the memory of the Vichy experience: a vivid memory of defeat, occupation, and repression. How has this proud nation dealt with les annees noires? What is the collective memory of those few years: what have the French chosen to remember, what have they chosen to conceal?

Richard Joseph Golsan

In this volume Europe?s leading modern historians offer new insights into two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that have profoundly affected world history?Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Until now historians have paid more attentionøto the similarities between these two regimes than to their differences. Stalinism and Nazism explores the difficult relationship between the history and memory of the traumas inflicted by Nazi and Soviet occupation in several Eastern European countries in the twentieth century. ø The first part of the volume explores the origins, nature, and organization of Hitler?s and Stalin?s dictatorial power, the manipulation of violence by the state systems, and the comparative power of the dictator?s personal will and the encompassing totalitarian system. The second part examines the legacies of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern European countries that experienced both. Stalinism and Nazism features the latest critical perspectives on two of the most influential and deadly political regimes in modern history.

History and Memory Compared

Stalinism and Nazism

"The Haunting Past is a brief but richly textured treatment of the role of the historian in dealing with information about contemporary political and legal matters."—Libraries and Culture

History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France

The Haunting Past

Eric Conan

A plea for a more moderate, balanced, and accurate view of the Vichy regime.

An Ever-present Past

Vichy

Rousso sets two tasks for himself: (1) to provide a history of the problem of contemporariness in history writing, starting in ancient Greece and coming up to today; (2) to analyze how contemporary history came to be a sub-discipline and especially how it arose in response to mass political violence in Europe over the course of the 20th century. No doubt, his is a European view but his cases come not just from French but from English, American, and German historiography and history. Above all, he is interested in how historians grapple with the problem of distance from an event even if they may have been participants. He is further interested in the struggle between older historians who may have lived through a period of history and younger ones who claim they can understand his experience. "

History, the Present, the Contemporary

The Latest Catastrophe

Le terme de « mémoire » n'est plus seulement un mot galvaudé, c'est un mot usé. Il a fini par désigner sans distinction tout type de rapport entre passé et présent, reléguant au second rang, non sans de vives querelles, d'autres modalités comme la tradition ou l'histoire. Si la mémoire continue de fonder toute identité collective, elle a donné lieu ces dernières décennies à des formes inédites de revendications sociales et de politiques publiques. Elle est devenue une valeur cardinale de notre temps, un nouveau droit humain, un marqueur des sociétés démocratiques, qui repose sur l'idée qu'il faut agir rétroactivement sur l'Histoire, même révolue, pour la « réparer » et la réécrire au nom de principes qui fondent notre présent.Dans cet ouvrage, Henry Rousso, l'un des premiers historiens à avoir travaillé sur l'histoire du souvenir des grands traumatismes collectifs, s'intéresse aux évolutions récentes des usages et politiques de mémoire en France mais montre aussi à quel point la compréhension de ces phénomènes doit se penser à une échelle globale, européenne ou mondiale. L'enjeu est d'importance : l'investissement considérable des sociétés modernes pour entretenir le souvenir des catastrophes historiques ne les a pas prémunies contre un retour du tragique et de la violence de masse qu'elles pensaient ainsi conjurer.

Henry Rousso

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