Introduction

The memory of Auschwitz and the question of Jewish identity have been key critical topoi in French political, cultural, and intellectual life since the end of World War II. Since Auschwitz, every word evoking its dark past either dissimulates guilt or simply denies the reality of the extermination. Beginning with the release of Marcel Ophuls's landmark documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (1970), there appeared a whole spate of books, films, and public debates that have not only attempted to demystify the notion of a totally courageous France resistant to Nazi aggression during World War II, but have also pointed out that the politics of collaboration practiced by the Vichy Regime were in some cases the extension of a long-standing French anti-Semitic tradition. Petain's national revolution was indigenous to certain aspects of French political culture, and not merely a German import.