Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France (review)

Writing on the Holocaust in France, from 1945 to 1967, although not completely impossible—in fact, some interesting books on that subject were published in the aftermath of the Second World War—was in any case infrequent. There was no particular word intended to refer to the destruction of the French (or the European) Jews, since neither the American word "Holocaust" nor the Hebrew word "Shoah" was used in French before the 1970s. And the history of the destruction of the Jews was not even a chapter in the history of the war in general as it was then taught in schools and colleges. In most cases, the Holocaust was not anything more than a footnote.

As Joan B. Wolf shows in her book, the situation changed dramatically with the Six-Day War. In June 1967, the Jews of France felt for first time that the fragile existence of Israel was in real danger, and that its possible disappearance might be for them a second "Holocaust." During those six hectic days, (non-Jewish) French public opinion was, for the first and the last time, largely favorable to Israel. Very soon after that, France turned back progressively to the Arab perspective on the conflict. French Jews had to adapt, in turn, to that new situation. They did it by choosing, in the first place, to speak, write, and publish more often about the Holocaust and the trauma it had left in the Jewish consciousness. The last survivors, feeling that they were becoming old, decided to break with their former silence. The field of Holocaust studies became then, in a few years, a significant one for Jewish and non-Jewish historians as well. And it carried, as it was easy to foresee, political stakes in French society as a whole.

In the next thirty years, the period of French history that Wolf explores, the words "Holocaust" and "genocide" were regularly used in French politics in order to denote to the sufferings of the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey (1915) or of the Cambodian population under the Khmer Rouge. They were also applied to the Atlantic slave trade and the massacre of Native Americans, and even to persecutions against homosexuals. In spite of its efforts to conserve the original meaning of the word "Holocaust," the French Jewish community felt, as a result, that its own unique history was not properly recognized, and discovered that it was not as fully integrated in the French nation as it had believed.

Although Wolf's thesis is, to some extent, correct, a French reader will, however, disagree with some of her assumptions, in part because most of them are based only on a close reading of French newspapers (which give a necessarily distorted perception of the reality), rather than on first-hand information and interviews with real people.

It is wrong to assume, for instance, that the American television film Holocaust (p. 71) and Spielberg's film Schindler's List (p. 151) met a favorable welcome in France: the first of those films was unanimously criticized, and the second was very controversial. It is equally wrong to say "Algerian Jews" (p. 89) when speaking of Jewish persons born in Algeria with French citizenship, and I doubt that my colleague Shmuel Trigano would like to think of himself as "a Sephardi professor of Jewish thought" (p. 99), although he, as a French sociologist, is very much interested in Jewish issues. On the contrary, Guy Sorman, who is a writer, will be happy to be called "a respected professor of politics" (p. 157). Still more worrisome, it is wrong to give the reader the impression that the slaughter of the Armenians in Turkey was not a real genocide (p. 110), or that the massacres in Sabra and Chatila were accomplished by Syrians rather than by Lebanese Christians (p. 103), or that the bombings on Rue Copernic and...