Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from Liberation to the Present by Olivier Wieviorka (review)

Olivier Wieviorka accomplishes a staggering amount in the 179 pages that constitute Divided Memory: French Recollections of World War II from Liberation to the Present. Indeed, one cannot help but be awed by the efficiency of this accomplished historian. He is in control of his sources and his narrative from the outset of the book, and presents a tight and compelling argument in each chapter and across the entire work. Scholars of modern French history, of World War II, and of the Shoah will find in Wieviorka’s book not only a valuable synthesis of current historiographical and theoretical impulses, but an eminently usable and accessible classroom resource.

Divided Memory, as the title suggests, probes the complexity of World War II in French memory and also, necessarily, in French experience. Wieviorka states early on that this experience—ambivalent, multifaceted, and with intense chronological and geographical particularity—is part of the problem of memory. Does it even make sense, he asks, to consider his topic to be war memory? “At the risk of exaggerating,” Wieviorka writes, “the experience of forty million French people between 1940 and 1945 was anything but an experience of war” (2). Nevertheless, with liberation and the subsequent surrender of the German Army, the French government and the French people had to confront the immediate past, in which war had fundamentally reshaped the nation, and a present that required some recognition of the past as past. In charting interpretations of 1939–1945, “the dark years,” to an ever-evolving and comparatively less dark present, Wieviorka trains his sights on the French national government. His aim is to “define the influence of the dark years on political debate by considering the respective positions the state, political parties, and associations adopted in giving an account of them (x)” and he does so with great success. Wieviorka not only describes the approaches each successive government took to remembering some aspects of World War II and forgetting or suppressing others, but also makes clear that both personal and political motives informed memorial policies and sometimes drove leaders, from de Gaulle to Mitterand, to obscure or elide personal and communal war experiences that they found distasteful, even dangerous.

What emerges, then, is a compelling account of the importance of memories of World War II to French identity and the simultaneous instability of those memories. The great additional strength of this book is Wieviorka’s commitment to presenting the external, material reality of war memory—his sotto voce argument that memory is about whose story gets told, whose film gets made, who can claim a pension, who can claim the benefits most governments grant those who have served in war, who deserves reparation. Tracing developments in reparation policy from 1944 to the twenty-first century may not be the sexiest or most fashionable approach to the problem of war memory, but it is a deeply important and, as it turns out, fascinating window onto French willingness to acknowledge the role of Vichy France in the Shoah.

Though historians of modern France who live and teach in English-speaking countries may not find many startling revelations in Divided Memory (many will know this book in the original French), the translation is nevertheless extremely valuable. With the amount of attention given to World War II in the histories and mythologies of the Anglophone allies, and the attractiveness of a generally one-sided presentation of the French experience of the war, Wieviorka’s work gives university students and non-specialists a highly-accessible account of French war memory. English-speaking audiences will surely by challenged by the messiness, the politicization, and the multi-directional tug and pull that has characterized official memory of the war. At the same time, all readers will surely be challenged by Wieviorka’s account to think carefully about the forces that have shaped American, British, and Australian memories of World War...