ABSTRACT
Already during the occupation period, historian Marc Bloch, founder of the “école des Annales,” was considering how a future generation of historians would retrace the thread that would lead to an understanding of the tragic events that France was going through at the time.2 As a positivist historian, he thought it obvious that the return of “freedom of thought and judgment” which would follow the liberation of French territory would act as a guarantee for historians to be able to work in a tranquil and honest fashion. Some sixty years after the tragic death of Marc Bloch, shot by the Germans in June 1944, Pierre Laborie highlights the extent to which the history of this period remains problematic, notwithstanding the undeniable progress made during the six decades that have passed since the World War II period. The complex nature of the links between France and its recent history has been underscored by Henry Rousso, one of the most eminent specialists in the construction of memory, in works eloquently entitled The Vichy Syndrome3 and Vichy: An Ever-present Past.4 The purpose of the present study is to invoke some of the most striking moments that became etched into the historical view of the peculiar world of collaboration generated between the Nazi occupier and part of France – and specifically, its leaders. It is important at the outset to make an observation about the terms
employed. With regard to the occupation period, use of the words “collaboration” and “collaborators” is a delicate matter, since they may denote different phenomena, even though they may be concomitant or may partially overlap. Generally speaking, collaboration refers to three phenomena: (1) state-level collaboration that the Vichy government attempted to institute,
particularly in the wake of the meeting between Marshal Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler at Montoire in October 1940; (2) ideological collaboration practiced by fascist and far right groups, which during the occupation were mainly Paris-based; (3) de facto collaboration, which existed among the ordinary French as a result of day-to-day contacts between the occupier and the occupied population. On the whole, this study will focus on the first kind of collaboration, although the two other forms will sometimes be touched upon. A priori, the evolution in the historical view of the collaborationist world in
the eyes of the French in general, and of French academics in particular, can be divided chronologically into two periods: from the liberation to the end of the 1960s, and from the beginning of the 1970s to the present.
